Everything Else Drifts Upward — On the Animated Short Film Saba

What the Reversed Gravity Means

In the world of Saba, gravity flows upward.

Not everything rises. Living things — people, plants, animals — remain anchored to the earth. Everything else slowly drifts upward, toward what the film suggests is another place on the other side.

Topaz describes the world's design as "primarily an emotional metaphor."² "The idea came from the feeling that our time in this world is borrowed. In Saba, everything alive remains anchored to the earth, while everything else slowly drifts upward toward another place." Death, in this physics, is not disappearance. It is distance. Things do not stop existing; they move beyond reach.

What this framing makes possible is worth considering carefully. The sensation that a person who has died has not entirely ceased to exist is one of the most common features of grief. The voice is still present somewhere in the ear. The quality of their attention, the specific way they held things, still registers in the body. Conventional narrative tends to treat this sensation as denial — a stage to pass through. Saba treats it as physics. The grandfather has not vanished. He has drifted upward. The hands cannot reach him, but the tether was real.

Animation is what makes this work as a visual language, and Topaz is direct about why: "Animation allows us to visualize emotions in a way that live action often cannot. The world of Saba is built entirely around metaphor. Gravity itself becomes part of the storytelling." A live-action film staging reversed gravity becomes a film about special effects. An animated film can let the physics be emotional without explanation.

What the Ropes and Anchors Are Doing

Throughout the film, ropes appear everywhere.

Houses hang suspended by them. The boat that serves as the grandfather's home is held to the earth by anchors running below. The old armchair where the grandfather sits is fastened down by cords. People in this world manage their anchoring as a matter of daily life.

Topaz is explicit about what they mean: "The ropes and anchors throughout the film represent our very human desire to hold on to the people and moments that matter most."²

One of the film's most quietly exact images comes when the grandfather pulls the lever of his reclining chair. The chair tilts — but the lever comes free. It becomes a fishing rod. The line extends upward, toward an invisible sea above their heads.

The logic is wordless and immediate. If the sea is above, you fish upward. The grandfather is grounded on the earth and casts his line toward the place where untethered things drift. He is reaching toward what has already gone, or what is going. And it reads as ordinary — a grandfather sitting in his chair, fishing, the boy beside him. The inversion has been absorbed into daily life.

The rain in the film falls upward, too. A storm arrives from below and the boat deploys umbrellas to hold it off. Natural forces have been rewritten. Every phenomenon familiar from ordinary experience arrives inverted, and the film neither explains nor apologizes for any of it. Once the world is established, the reversals land as matter-of-fact.

The Single Shot

Saba has no cuts.

The entire nine minutes move as one continuous camera motion. This was also the condition of its production: artists from multiple countries and time zones worked simultaneously on different sections of the same continuous move, each team building their portion while another team on the opposite side of the world was asleep.² Camera movement, character animation, environments, timing, and transitions had to connect seamlessly across crews who never shared the same working hours.

Why no cuts?

Grief does not cut. The before and the after are not separated by an edit — they are connected by a continuous flow of time through which something changes. Memory does not cut either. The recollections of childhood and the recollections of loss exist within the same unbroken stream of a life, which is why the absence can feel so present even years later. There is no edit point at which the grandfather was there and then was not. There is only the continuous shot, and the place within it where the rope comes loose.

When a film uses cuts, it signals: here is where things change. When there are no cuts, the change has to arrive differently — from within the flow, quietly, without announcement.

Closure Is Not Forgetting

After a sudden event separates the boy from his grandfather, the boy travels in search of one more moment.

Where that journey ends, Topaz does not want described in advance: "Whether the story happens in a dream, a memory, or reality is intentionally left open to interpretation. I was more interested in emotional truth than literal truth."² The film makes room for the viewer's own experience to enter.

At Tribeca, that room filled. "Audience members from completely different backgrounds approached me afterward to share stories about their own grandparents, parents, and loved ones," Topaz said. The film — nine minutes, almost wordless, made by artists from different countries who never shared a workday — landed as something recognizable to people who had no particular connection to the story it tells.

Topaz uses the word closure, but carefully. "Closure isn't about forgetting. It's about learning how to carry those memories forward."²

There is a difference between letting go and learning to hold something differently. The ropes in the film are not released; they are what remains when the anchor shifts. The boy does not stop reaching. He learns the shape of the distance.

The official website for the film is at saba-film.com. Saba continues its festival run in 2026, with screenings at Palm Springs International ShortFest, ShortShorts Film Festival & Asia (Tokyo), Sydney Film Festival, Shanghai International Film Festival, and others.