Niki Lindroth von Bahr's The End: a miniature airport of waiting souls, four years in development

Stop Motion Magazine profiled The End, Niki Lindroth von Bahr's stop-motion short, on 8 November 2026. The whole film takes place in a miniature international airport, built by set maker Nicklas Nilsson, whose counters, corridors and barriers decide where the characters can stand and move. Its passengers and staff are animals: a frog pilot who cannot reach the control tower, a badger businessman in duty-free, mole inspectors questioning a fly, and a dolphin employee close to burnout. Lindroth von Bahr ties the setting to the waiting souls of Dante's Divine Comedy, an airport that promises movement but keeps people waiting, with luxury shopping beside the threat of detention. As in The Burden and Something to Remember, she uses animal bodies on purpose: the strangeness of the body puts the viewer at a distance that leads back to recognisable human feelings. The film took nearly four years to develop, and she says the death of her father and the birth of her second child in the same month shaped its mood. She wrote it with Jen Silverman and edited it with Henry Moore Selder; Hans Appelqvist composed the music, and the voices are Alexander Skarsgård, Anna Mouglalis, Noomi Rapace and Denis Lavant. It is a Swedish-French-Danish co-production of Malade AB, Les Valseurs and Wired Fly with Film i Väst and SVT. The End premiered in the Cannes short film competition in 2026 and was in competition at Ottawa's 50th edition.