Flow

Flow is a 2024 animated feature directed, produced, and co-written by Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis. The film follows a dark gray cat living alone in a forest landscape marked by abandoned human-made structures, including a home filled with cat sculptures. When an immense flood submerges the territory, the cat escapes aboard a small sailboat. Its fellow travelers are a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur, a secretarybird, and a golden retriever. The animals do not speak; their relationships, fears, quarrels, and cooperation are conveyed through movement, sound, and the changing space of the boat.

The journey takes the group through flooded ruins and steeply altered terrain as water rises and later recedes. Flow’s story does not explain the disaster through dialogue or exposition. Instead, it observes the cat—initially wary of other animals—learning to share food, shelter, and responsibility. The boat becomes the film’s central setting and a practical test of coexistence. The narrative includes encounters with other animals and with a larger vessel controlled by a troop of lemurs, while the secretarybird’s separate arc adds a more mysterious, spiritual dimension.

Zilbalodis made the film after Away, his 2019 debut feature, which he created largely by himself. Flow was a substantially larger international production, made by Dream Well Studio in Latvia, Sacrebleu Productions in France, and Take Five in Belgium. Zilbalodis co-wrote the screenplay with Matīss Kaža. The score was composed by Zilbalodis and Rihards Zaļupe. Its computer animation was created using Blender, the free and open-source 3D creation software, a production choice widely noted in coverage of the film.

Flow premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It later won the Jury Award and the Audience Award in the Contrechamp competition at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival. The film’s international reception turned it into an awards-season landmark for Latvian cinema. At the 82nd Golden Globe Awards, it won Best Animated Feature Film, becoming the first Latvian film to receive a Golden Globe. It then won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards, again a first for Latvia. Flow was also nominated for Best International Feature Film, making it the first Latvian film nominated in that Academy Award category.

The film’s wordless design is not an incidental stylistic device: it allows animal behavior, environmental sound, and visual storytelling to carry emotion. Humans are absent, but their abandoned structures remain.