At this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, one thing becomes strikingly clear; voice is no longer a supporting element in cinema.
Across animation and formally experimental work, filmmakers leaned into voiceover and voice performance as tools of intimacy and contradiction. Voices narrated inner worlds and exposed tensions that visuals alone cannot. These brilliant films demonstrated how voice can reshape the relationship between audience and character.
That effect is felt across the Glasgow Film Festival programme. Live-action films like Couture, The Plague, and Erupcja each experiments with vocal presence in distinct ways – from restrained narration to emotionally dissonant delivery – whilst animated titles such as Bouchra, Decorado, Allah is Not Obliged, and Death Does Not Exist pushes voice into philosophical and political territory. It appears that filmmakers are increasingly interested not just in what characters say, but also in how voices carry memory, displacement, humour, and doubt. The human voice – with all its imperfections and hesitations – becomes a site of storytelling in and of itself.
Bouchra
Few films embodied this approach as clearly as Bouchra, co-directed by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki – a meta, semi-autobiographical animated feature that turns voice into both subject and structure.
Emerging from Bennani’s 2 Lizards web series (her first major project produced in the United States rather than Morocco), the film expands that universe into more personal territory. The titular animated lizard character, voiced by Bennani, acts as a semi-fictional double: an artist moving between Casablanca and New York, trying to shape a story that belongs to both places at once. The question of belonging is not resolved just through plot but through speech – through how the character talks, hesitates, and revises herself aloud.
The film folds inward. We watch Bouchra attempt to make a film about herself, revisiting ideas, stalling, arguing, doubting. Scenes loop and return with slight shifts; creative paralysis becomes narrative movement. At times, the animated figure freezes while city life continues behind her – Brooklyn apartments and Casablanca skylines suspended between motion and stillness. In these moments, the voice carries what the image withholds. Thought continues even when action stops, turning hesitation itself into dramatic momentum.
Bennani’s performance avoids polish, and that refusal becomes thematic.
Her delivery moves between bravado and uncertainty, humour and fatigue, often within a single line. Jokes collapse into admissions; confidence gives way to self-questioning. The instability of tone reflects the instability of cultural position the film explores. Speaking becomes an act of negotiation rather than expression – an attempt to reconcile competing expectations from different audiences and identities.
The questions she raises emerge organically from this vocal tension. Why are difficult conversations so hard to sustain? When does translation become betrayal? Why does artistic ambition produce guilt? These questions do not arrive as scripted statements but as thoughts forming in real time. Pauses, restarts, and shifts in rhythm expose the labour of self-translation, suggesting that identity here is something continually revised through language rather than fixed in advance.
This is where voice and theme fully converge.
Bouchra examines cultural mistranslation not only between languages but between ways of being seen and understood. Bennani’s vocal performance embodies that condition. Her delivery shifts across registers, accents, and emotional tones, never settling into a stable mode of address. The voice moves between intimacy and performance, certainty and doubt, mirroring the experience of living between worlds without resolving into one.
As a result, meaning emerges through modulation – through uncertainty left audible. The act of speaking becomes the space where identity and authorship collide.
Decorado
Another highlight from the Glasgow Film Festival is Alberto Vázques‘s Decorado. This centres on Arnold, a middle-aged mouse whose life begins to feel fundamentally unreal. Governed by routine and corporate bureaucracy, Arnold grows convinced that everything around him is artificial; a staged environment constructed to maintain social order. What begins as a private existential doubt expands into an open rebellion against a system that appears to script every aspects of daily life. The film proceeds to unfold as a darkly comic search for authenticity inside a world that increasingly resembles histrionic, theatrical scenery rather than reality itself.
Vázques frames this premise as an existential anti-fable – less concerned with escape than with the psychological cost of recognising illusion. Crucially, that recognition emerges through voice before image. Arnold’s crisis is articulated verbally long before the film visually confirms his suspicions. Conversations feel subtly misaligned: dialogue sounds rehearsed and emotionally flattened – as though characters are performing roles that they did not choose. Speech becomes part of the decor itself (yet another mechanism sustaining a sense of normality).
Lines are delivered with weary neutrality, producing a tonal dissonance between the cute anthropomorphic figures and the despair that they verbalise. This friction is paramount to the film’s effect. Characters speak constantly, and yet communication fails to generate connection, reinforcing the film’s critique of socially scripted behaviour and emotional performance.
As Arnold’s awareness deepens, voiceover functions as intrusion.
His reflections spiral – questioning his love and freedom in rhythms that echo philosophical monologue. Meaning accumulates through hesitation and recurrence – thoughts returning slightly altered, mirroring the cyclical structures of society he struggles to escape. The voice makes no attempt to clarify reality, rather, it destabilises it – turning speech into evidence of consciousness trapped inside an authored world.
In this sense, Decorado extends Vázquez’s broader project of using animation and voiceover as a Trojan horse for existential inquiry. The polished visuals surfaces evoke familiarity, even nostalgia, but the voices undermine comfort at every turn. What ultimately collapses is not the set itself but faith in language as truth. Characters continue speaking even after recognising the illusion, suggests that identity persists not through certainty, but through the stubborn act of articulation within an artificial world.
Allah Is Not Obliged
Directed by Zaven Najjar and adapted from Ahmadou Kouroma’s novel, Allah Is Not Obliged follows Birahima, a young boy travelling across West Africa after the death of his mother, hoping to reach relatives in Liberia. Instead, he becomes entangled in the region’s civil wars, moving between militias and armed groups who recruit children with promises of money and status. The film traces his journey through sifting borders and unstable alliances, charting how quickly circumstances reshapes a child’s understanding of survival.
What distinguishes the film is that Birahima tells the story himself, and he tells it relentlessly.
His voiceover runs almost continuously, guiding the viewer through unfamiliar political terrain whilst also correcting and anticipating the narrative. He explains factions and pauses to clarify cultural references.
The voiceover narration also moves ahead of the action. Birahima frequently tells us what will happen before we see it. Who will die, who he will lose, and what moments will matter later. These small acts of prognostication changes how the scenes play out. Ergo the film creates a sense of inevitability as we, the audience, watch the events unfold already marked by memory.
There is a striking dissonance between the speaker and the languages he uses. Birahima sounds confident – even amused at times – but the certainty often feels learned. It’s the cadence of someone repeating explanations he’s had to absorb too quickly. The voice carries political context and emotional distance all at once, allowing the film to move through violence without reducing him to silence. Only gradually does it become clear how little space the film gives him without it.
Death Does Not Exist
Death Does Not Exist, directed by Quebecois director Félix Dufour-Laperrière, follows a young activist, Hélène, within a small revolutionary collective preparing for an act of political violence. The group moves through forests, safe houses, and temporary spaces shaped by secrecy and shared purpose. Yet the film is less concerned with the mechanics of resistance than with dissecting belief structures – particularly the psychological and moral aftermath of committing oneself to an idea larger than the self.
As the narrative unfolds, action gives way to reflection, and the film shifts from collective momentum towards personal reckoning. Voice is central to that shift. The story is propelled by voiceover that speaks from a position removed from the events we see, suggesting memory rather than immediacy. Hélène doesn’t attempt to justify the movement or explain its ideology. She instead revisits moments of choice and consequence, searching for meaning in decisions that once appeared clear.
The distance between voice and image produces the film’s political tension.
Onscreen, the collective initially appears unified, defined by shared intention. In the voiceover, certainty fractures. The narration pulls political action back into individual consciousness, exposing the gap between collective identity and private doubt. What seemed absolute in the moment becomes unstable when remembered. This instability embeds itself within the film’s construction.
Voquent spoke to the film’s director, Félix Dufour-Laperrière, about his experience recording the voiceover.
He explained, “I recorded the voice before the drawings. We had a precise script… the words said are exactly the ones that were written in the script.” Yet, even within this fixed text, performance reshapes meaning.
He emphasised the collaborative nature of this process: it was “a matter of working with the actresses to not only get the right tone but the right mindset… they were very good. I casted them for who they were.” Because animation allows sentences to be rebuilt from different takes, the voice becomes a flexible site of interpretation. He notes, “The words were the same, but the intention between the sentences change… what was planned as an angry sequence began to change, ending up with a warmer tone. There was some delicate dialogue that turned out to be very tense and much quicker.” Performers bring their own intelligence and embodiment to the text, creating subtle variations that mirror the film’s thematic tensions.
Dufour-Laperrère uses repetition and measured pacing to reinforce this effect. Thoughts return in slightly altered forms, as if understanding remains unfinished. The voice insists on continued reflection, shaped by performers whose interpretations alter the emotional trajectory of each sentence. As he observes, “The actresses have their own intelligence and their own way of rendering their own ideas… I totally respect that and I accept these propositions.” Even with a controlled script, the intention of speech changes, producing a rhythm of reconsideration rather than resolution.
In this way, Death Does Not Exist treats voice as the site where politics resides, in an ongoing effort to live with its consequences. Speaking becomes an act of endurance — a way of carrying belief forward even after certainty has disappeared.
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