A playful tribute to the words our grandparents used (but we can’t pronounce)

In her short film The Lost Sound, the Australian filmmaker Steffie Yee playfully interrogates how language evolves, causing words – and even sounds – to disappear within cultures between generations. Featuring the contemporary Japanese poet Hiromi Itō reading from her own poem ‘On Ç’, Yee’s brief animation features an unseen woman struggling to bequeath a fictional lost sound to an animated character – to no avail. A second-generation immigrant herself, Yee’s resonance with the source material permeates the short, which brings Itō’s words to life via an idiosyncratic blend of percussive, hypnotic music and an eclectic visual style.