A compact and light-hearted Brazilian animation, Papaya, screening at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, feels exceptionally sincere and heartening as director Priscilla Kelle’s feature debut. Without dialogue, the constant adventure of the papaya seed reflects a teeming Amazonian forest landscape blazing with colours through its vitality and the complex interactions of plants coexisting within the same ecosystem.

Beginning with the inner structure of a papaya fruit, the film traces the seed’s lifecycle through its journey: from germination and rooting to inevitable exposure to pesticides, and ultimately to being swallowed and excreted by a bird. In doing so, it reveals the intrinsic rhythm of life between plants and animals in the natural world.

As the main character, the seed stands for organic growth in obedience to natural law. In contrast, the crisis it encounters and witnesses in a factory serves as a chilling portrait of human-interfered, chemically fed products that are severely against nature’s design. Seeing so many replicas of itself lying on the conveyor belt, being measured, picked, labelled, then dumped, it somehow summons the courage to press the pause button. Perhaps this gesture of a single seed is a parable that resonates far beyond the world of plants.

The shifting perspective is also something worth paying attention to. On one hand, it presents a world childlike and simple enough to belong entirely to a plant: the seed knows nothing of capitalism, only the mother tree, forest plant fellows, and soil. On the other hand, the adult viewer cannot unsee the layer of social metaphors: the assembly line, the standardisation, the discarding after over-harvesting; this is no longer just the fate of plants.

Composed of geometric shapes, with depth signaled by colour blocks rather than perspective, the film tells a three-dimensional story through two-dimensional means. Beneath its playful surface lies a cool, detached distance. It does not attempt to replicate reality; it constructs one that can be understood. The photo collage of plants near the end gently pulls you back to reality, encouraging reflection on what a green ecosystem should truly look like.

While the earlier plot focuses on the above-soil world, where joy and jeopardy connect, the ending scene plunges us into a punk underground party. Here, creatures often labeled “evil” thrive: flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, all moving to their own rhythms and beats. It is in this space that the seed’s life begins to flash before its eyes, a kaleidoscope of exotic patterns shifting in time with the hypnotic music, creating a strangely mesmerising tension.

In the director’s vision, there is no absolute good or bad. The sun-drenched world above and the so-called “filthy” underworld each possess their own charm and vitality. Nature, in all its forms, is pictured as utterly adorable. The only place that truly chills the plants and the viewer is the factory. This is Papaya’s quietly radical undercurrent: more than a seed’s point of view, it is a fable that sharply points to a long-existing truth, delivered in a form both rounded and witty. The charm of Kelle’s work is sure to spread the delight of this curious seed to everyone who watches it.

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Written by Jane Wei

Featured image courtesy of Priscilla Kellen

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