Tako Tsubo

The title of Fanny Sorgo and Eva Pedroza’s Tako Tsubo is a play on Takotsubo syndrome.

An acute and sudden form of heart failure brought on by extreme emotional distress, the condition echoes the circumstances in which Mr. Ham (voiced by Len Jakobsen) finds himself. “Here on one side there is a beautiful sunrise,” he tries to explain to his doctor, “and then there’s a war.” Plagued by a fundamental heartache as a result of the world’s overwhelming contradictions, he is seeking a heart removal that will separate him from his pain.

Such inconsistencies are central to the human condition, but Tako Tsubo seems to tap into the exaggerated nature of these cognitive dissonances in the hyper-connected modern world. The description of beauty and horror side by side could just as easily be the consecutive images scrolled past on social media and there are occasions when only a surgical intervention seems like it can combat the sorrowfulness.

Pedroza’s hand-drawn animation emphasises the marks that life leaves on us with the way that the movement of objects is coloured over, mostly erasing their former position, but not quite. It creates visual echoes that follow the characters and their actions, meaning that what they say and do feels like it remains on screen long after the fact. In the same moment as its characters seek to dislocate themselves from bodily manifestations of their ailments, Sorgo and Pedroza remind us of the lingering past through the visible fingerprints of the film’s physical creation.

Directors: Fanny Sorgo, Eva Pedroza
Cast: Len Jakobsen, Anne Kulbatzki, Benjamin Martin
Producers: Eva Pedroza,
Screenplay: Fanny Sorgo
Animation: Eva Pedroza
Music: Mary Ocher
Sound design: Christian Obermaier
Production companies: Fondazione MAST (Italy)
Venue: Berlinale (Berlinale Shorts)
In English, Arabic
17 minutes