RE:STORE

If the clock cannot be turned back – how can we deal with our memories? The 3D animation “RE:STORE” confronts the viewer with finitude: the heroine, Zhuang-Zhou Lin, is a make-up artist in a mortuary who, thanks to her experience and skilled hands, knows how to restore the face of a deceased person, even after an accident or an assault. The deceased woman she takes care of in the animation has a tattoo on her arm showing a butterfly coming to life and flying away. Suddenly the heroine remembers her mother, who also had a butterfly tattoo and whom she had turned her back on at a young age. Her painful childhood reappears before her inner eye, but in the end she manages to reconcile with her mother and find peace. The touching images of this story and the complex feelings of the protagonist reveal seemingly unsolvable family conflicts. But since the past cannot be changed, why not turn the hourglass upside down and clarify the outlook once again? The message here is that death is like the intersection of a journey, at the end of which both sides continue on their respective paths.Statement by the juryThe story in this animated film about a mortuary make-up artist with a difficult childhood is told in coherently graceful images and goes straight to the heart. It succeeds convincingly in linking the different levels of the present and the remembered past and making them so tangible for the audience that they can immediately identify with the protagonist and feel for her. The sound design also fits perfectly with the partly dramatic and sustained images and rounds off the story harmoniously.