Surrealism, Freedom, and Human Connection: Rami Jarboui on The Bird’s Placebo. Sundance Film Festival

At Sundance, animation isn’t just spectacle, it’s language. And few films in the Animated Shorts program speak as poetically as The Bird’s Placebo, a surreal and deeply human short from Tunisian animator and filmmaker Rami Jarboui.

I sat down with Jarboui to talk about his journey, the long road to Sundance, and why animation became the perfect medium to tell a story about freedom, disability, and the global South’s relationship with the world.

For Jarboui, being selected for Sundance Film Festival is nothing short of a dream realized. His filmmaking journey began humbly with The Soup, a short film shot entirely on a phone. That project won the top prize at the Mobile Film Festival in Paris, opening doors to new productions, collaborators, and ultimately the creative team behind The Bird’s Placebo. Since then, Jarboui has navigated between documentary, live action, and animation. Never limiting himself to a single form.

But The Bird’s Placebo was different. It demanded time, patience, and a level of technical ambition rarely seen in Tunisian animation. The film uses a complex mix of rotoscoping, 2D, and 3D animation techniques that are resource intensive anywhere in the world, and especially challenging in regions where animation infrastructure is still developing.

What made the process even more intentional was Jarboui’s insistence that the animation team be entirely Tunisian. Despite offers to outsource post-production abroad, he refused. For him, animation isn’t just visual, it’s cultural. If he was going to present a Tunisian animated film to the world, it had to be animated by Tunisians.

“I wanted the film to show what my country can do,” he told me. “In animation, the people behind the images matter just as much as the images themselves.”

The story itself centers on a young man in a wheelchair, living in a Tunisian neighborhood and dreaming of crossing the Mediterranean. A powerful symbol of freedom, escape, and possibility. The inspiration comes from both collective and personal history. After Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, many young people felt their hopes stall instead of materialize. Jarboui also drew from a real encounter with a young man who had been shot during the revolution, underwent surgery in France, and returned home confined to a wheelchair, his sacrifice met with little societal change.

That emotional weight shaped the film’s core. The wheelchair isn’t just physical, it represents a generation feeling stuck, dreaming of movement in a world that refuses to move with them.

Authenticity was essential. The neighborhood in the film is based on a real place near a lake known for its birds, a familiar environment for everyday Tunisians, not a postcard version of the country. Jarboui wanted local audiences to recognize themselves first. If Tunisians believed in the reality of the film, he believed the rest of the world would too.

Animation, for Jarboui, was the only way to tell this story. The film lives in the space of magical realism rooted in reality, but touched by the surreal. Influenced by writers like Gabriel García Márquez, he uses animation to reveal emotional and psychological truths that live action alone couldn’t fully capture.

Rotoscoping allowed him to preserve the raw performances of real actors. The film was first shot like a traditional live-action short on green screen, then painstakingly animated over more than two years. In total, Jarboui spent nearly five years living with this film. Over 10,000 frames hand-drawn and layered with cities, birds, and imagined worlds.

When we talked about inspiration, Jarboui pointed to Japanese animation and filmmakers like Satoshi Kon, as well as films like Waking Life, which showed him that animation could have its own cinematic grammar. For him, animation offers something powerful: freedom without permission. If you can imagine it, you can create it, regardless of budget.

That philosophy carries into what he hopes audiences take away from The Bird’s Placebo. At its heart, the film is about freedom, not as an isolated concept, but as something interconnected. Jarboui wants viewers to understand that no one’s freedom exists independently. The global South and global North are bound together, whether we acknowledge it or not.

He hopes the film reminds audiences of a shared humanity, families, dreams, pain, and love that transcend borders. In a world increasingly defined by division, The Bird’s Placebo argues quietly but firmly for humanism.

Ending our conversation, we touched on the symbolism of Sundance’s final year in Park City. Jarboui smiled, comparing it to “old wine” something timeless and valuable. Being part of that history, he said, feels deeply meaningful.

The Bird’s Placebo isn’t just an animated short. It’s a statement about where stories come from, who gets to tell them, and how animation can carry the emotional weight of an entire generation.

Kickin’ It With Tyree.