‘On The Surface’ is a 4mn animation about a young Black woman who goes swimming in the Icelandic sea and reflects on her experience of having a baby in a country that feels nothing like home. As she enters the freezing water, she relives her traumatic pregnancy and postnatal depression. Soon her swimming eases. Being in the wild and facing her fears is helping her heal.
Gisella dreams about writing important things, genuine things, and quits her job at the newspaper after yet another article is insensitively edited. She contacts a recently started alternative paper, where she is given the proposition of writing an article about the living situation among immigrants. Through her research she meets Marisol, Abeba and her daughter Lucinda, who live in a barrack by the harbor. To help solve their financial troubles, she invites them to live in her large house that she inherited from her grandmother. At first everything works well, but soon the mutual respect between the three women turns into a power struggle and hospitality is replaced with rules and a system of punishments.
