In an essay for the Huffington Post published in 2014, Torill Kove, MUP’89, described a turning point in her life. In 1991, unemployed and with time on her hands, she made frequent trips to the National Film Board’s viewing centre, then on St-Denis.
“Two things happened as I was sifting through the NFB animation collection,” she wrote. “One was excitement at having discovered such a wonderful treasure of films, and the other was a voice in me that said loud and clear, ‘I want to do this.’”
Kove, now an NFB filmmaker herself, happily immersed herself in the NFB’s rich array of short animated films.

“I just love drawing,” says Kove. “Since I was quite young, I’ve liked writing. I like telling stories. When I discovered this thing which is what I guess they call auteur animated shorts, I just thought, ‘Wow, yay. I can do that,’” says Kove.
The Norwegian-born, Canadian filmmaker has established herself internationally as a master of the form.
She has earned Academy Award nominations for three of her short animated films, including My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts (2000), The Danish Poet (an Oscar winner in 2007), and Me and My Moulton (2015). In 2015, she received Norway’s top cultural prize, the Anders Jahre Culture Prize.
Her newest film Maybe Elephants didn’t pick up an Oscar nomination, but it was on the shortlist for this year’s prize.
“You can do anything with it really,” she says of the short animated film format. “Some people, and I’ve been one of them, say that animated short film is to film what poetry is to literature. You use the tools that you have, and you try to put whatever it is that you want to say into that limited amount of time.”
Her newest work packs a lot into its roughly 16 minutes. It explores shifting family dynamics, examines the culture shock and excitement associated with a dramatic move, and shares the tale of a safari misadventure. It is also a meditation on the nature of memory.
“The funny thing is, when I’m drawing these streetscapes, I think, ‘Oh, I guess I’m still an urban planner.’ It was a great education and I’m using it.”
Filmmaker Torill Kove
The film is a sequel of sorts to Me and My Moulton, and, like its predecessor, is based on events from Kove’s own life. Me and My Moulton followed a seven-year-old version of Kove, growing up with her sisters in Norway, and contending with the embarrassment occasionally caused by her parents and their unorthodox ways.
In Maybe Elephants, the sisters are all teens, and the family embarks on a surprising adventure – they move to Nairobi, Kenya, where her father (both her parents are architects) has landed a two-year contract to design schools.
The move is precipitated by what seems to be a spur-of-the-moment decision by Kove’s mother, who struggles with depression – described in the film by Kove (the movie’s narrator) as a “cloud that descended on mom. I don’t know what was in that cloud and we never talked about it, but it made her restless and distant.”
Kove’s depiction of 1970s Nairobi is vivid – a bustling, energetic city where the Jacaranda trees have left “a carpet of purple flowers on the ground, making the city smell like honey.” The sisters discover that the city has abundant charms (including cute boys) and a few things to watch out for (a Norwegian embassy official cautions the family about sitting cobras).

As Kove relays her story, she calls into question her own reliability as the narrator. A pivotal moment in the film, one that portrays her mother as brave and protective, isn’t a memory shared by her sisters.
“I’m sure a lot of siblings do this. You get together and you talk about growing up and everyone has their own memories,” says Kove. “I see this with my husband [McGill music professor Kevin Dean] too. He has two brothers, and they get together and they always remember things differently.
“When you try to explain relationships, which is what I’m doing with my mother in this film, I’m cherry-picking memories,” says Kove. “I want to remember the good things about her. And there were darker things that I can’t really ignore, but I don’t want that to be what I remember most clearly. I have this memory of my mother on our safari, getting out of the car to chase away the elephants, and I remember it so clearly. She is the one who is going to protect her family come hell or high water – or elephants on a camp site. But my sisters don’t remember it like that.”
Kove’s films typically have a strong sense of place – and that’s no accident.
“I’ve had people come up to me after a screening of Maybe Elephants, people who have been to Nairobi, and they’ve said I recognize that street. I know that skyline. That just makes me so happy,” says Kove.
“Part of that is definitely related to my urban planning education.” Kove earned a master’s degree in that discipline at McGill. “In my films, I really want Oslo to look like Oslo, and I really wanted Copenhagen to look like Copenhagen in The Danish Poet. And for the interiors of the homes I grew up in, I wanted them to reflect the wacky Bohemian 20th-century modern thing that my parents had at the time. The funny thing is, when I’m drawing these streetscapes, I think, ‘Oh, I guess I’m still an urban planner.’ It was a great education and I’m using it.”