If the film is about lipstick, draw it with lipstick.
A friend of mine said it years ago: “If you want to make a film about makeup, you might as well draw it with lipstick.” We took it to heart, and made a rule of it. Most animated films for institutions are made in the studio’s default medium, chosen for reasons that have nothing to do with the subject. We do the opposite.
Babalola's excavations at Ile-Ife showed that Yoruba beadmakers were producing their own glass beads centuries earlier than the histories allowed. So the film is not drawn. It is made from beads, the characters wearing beads because they are made of beads.
Bergholz's book on Kulen Vakuf came out of fifteen minutes in an archive's basement: eighty boxes, no shelves, a blue folder labelled Sites of Mass Executions. The subject is the archive, so the archive is the material. The corridors are stacked paper; the researcher is covered in handwriting. What survived of the town is the record, and a film about the record is made of nothing the record is not.
Meier works in the Magdeburg police archive on the deportation of Sinti and Roma. The fingerprint is how the system reduced a person to a record, and the proof the person could not be reduced: every print is singular. Her film is made of prints — as the bureaucratic mark, as the ground the deported walk across, and as the thing that survives.