A Bear Remembers short film review: A heartbreaking fable about cultural erosion

The opening moments of A Bear Remembers, presented in the guise of a television news report, add a fresh mystery to Britain’s compendium of the paranormal. Citizens of the town of Greyhill speak of an eerie, rhythmically erratic clanging sound emanating from some unknown source. The community is baffled: “No one seems to have any answer for us.” 

A different noise – the buzzing of a camera drone – signals a shift out of the report and into the story about to unfold. Having failed to interest a visiting news team in his footage of the misty hillsides, the drone’s young operator tries his hand at sleuthing and soon discovers a connection between the noise and an elderly woman. 

Directors Linden Feng and Hannah Palumbo, who’ve made eye-catching commercials and music videos under the handle Zhang + Knight, largely forgo flashiness here, drawing inspiration from Studio Ghibli’s ecological fables and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s gentle mysticism. 

A quietly heartbreaking allegory about cultural loss, A Bear Remembers becomes magical with the arrival of the character that embodies the film’s core theme: an oversized ursine creature which emerges from the mists looking for anyone else who remembers the old ways. This wizened spirit animal’s world-weary gravitas is not entirely down to Ciarán Hinds’s voice performance, but his presence certainly doesn’t hurt. 

► A Bear Remembers is streaming on Vimeo now.