Father & Daughter

This short film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Animated Film, but lost out to The Perriwig Maker.

It is a sad story with a puzzling conclusion.

Issues arose in my mind.

Our separation from our Creator. Our Creator who loves us but leaves us in the world seemingly without reason. We are unable to understand why or what happened. We yearn for Him, but He is not with us physically, and does not return. We carry on with life. Things change. The world changes. We change. At the end, we return to Him where we last were left by Him. We are never really sure if we would ever meet Him again. When we do, He is as He always was, unchanged, as we last remember Him. We also return to Him in the way that we were, children to Him.

Our yearning for the Divine is the yearning of the orphan for the lost parent. It is no coincidence that our Master the Prophet was an orphan in this world, even though his parents were young when they died. He teaches us, and the Qur'an teeaches repeatedly, that we must be kind to the orphan, that He found us as orphans. This can be read in the spiritual sense as well, for we are all orphans in this world, cut off from our true parent - God.

There is a hadith where our Master the Prophet of God said to the effect that on the Day of Judgment the believer will meet his Lord like a child that has been separated from its mother.

The film would be totally meaningless if not for the fact that most of it is about the daughter's constant remembering of her lost father. It is because of her keeping his memory alive that she is reunited with him in the end. It makes me reflect - that just as the daughter in this film kept the memory of her father alive all those years - do I remember God enough? Would I be as glad to see Him and run into His embrace when I see Him on Judgment Day? Or would I be amongst those who would not recognise Him or run away from His wrath instead?