What you’ll watch below was made within the DOX:LAB initiative of the CPH:DOX (Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival) – an international film production program launched in 2009 for creativity and artistic exchange, where selected filmmakers are paired in teams of two and given carte blanche and a grant to make a film. The experiment has been an overwhelming success with completed films that went through the program, selected for major international film festivals, like Berlin and Venice, as well as Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Toronto and Locarno. 

Here’s one of them – a short titled "Walk With Me," released online today, via IFFR Presents (a weekly series of short films on YouTube curated by the International Film Festival Rotterdam), which was co-directed by the team made up of Peter Tukai Muhumuza, a Ugandan multi-media artist (photographer, painter and filmmaker of primarily stop-motion animations), and Danish filmmaker Johan Oettinger.

Using a mix of live action and puppet animation, "Walk With Me" follows a 9-year-old Ugandan girl with a dream to become a dancer, who spends her days working on her family’s farm, while daydreaming. One day, one of the animals she’s tasked with taking care of falls ill, and even though she tries to take care of it, she ends up having to kill it. The task is too much for her, and hesitant to kill the animal, she instead nurtures and looks after it. But it becomes increasingly ill, and the girl decides to stay with it until it finally dies.

It’s ultimately a complex and sometimes dark view into a little girl’s world of imagination, as she first encounters and tries to make sense of death.

Watch it below: