Review by philip_vanderveken

How often will it happen that a young guy sends his very first, not even finished, movie to one of the most famous film festivals in the world and then sees how it is not only selected as one of the movies that will be shown during the festival, but even gets nominated for the Golden Palm and gets the Jury Prize? Normally you would say never, but it happened to Jonas Geirnaert, a young student animation who sent in his unfinished graduation-work and astonished the world with it.

"Flatlife" shows life in a block of apartments. Even though the four inhabitants don't seem to have anything to do with each other, their actions influence the lives of the others. When for instance one of them switches his television to another channel, the other one's television switches channels too. When the washing machine of one of the inhabitants malfunctions, everything in the other apartments starts shaking around...

I don't know if Geirnaert wanted to give us some kind of message with this short film. I guess there are many different ways of interpreting it all, but in my opinion that's not even the most important part of the movie. Thanks to the sometimes absurd humor (like for instance a flying panda), this is just incredibly funny. And although I feared that I wouldn't like it all that much, because I was expecting a lot, maybe even too much of it (over here it was an incredible hype), I must admit that there was absolutely no reason for that fear. This was just a very good short animation film which made me laugh out loud a couple of times. I give it an 8/10 and I hope that Geirnaert will come up with more movies like this in the future.