Poverty, desire, and a bargain that costs more than it promises drive The Girl In The River, a 2026 Canadian animated short from directors Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski.
What is The Girl In The River about?
The film builds its fable around a boy with little to his name who falls for a girl whose tears turn into pearls when they fall. That single strange fact reshapes everything around it: what begins as affection curdles into temptation once the value of those tears becomes impossible to ignore, and the boy is drawn into a bargain that sets love against greed. As the stakes rise, the story keeps circling back to a question of survival, asking how much of a person's better instincts can be traded away before there is nothing left to protect. Told through animation rather than live performance, the fantasy premise stays grounded in a very human dilemma about what people will do when scarcity meets something rare.
About the cast
The voice cast is led by James Hyndman, alongside Simone Paradis, Gabrielle Dallaire, and Charlotte Loseth. As with many short-format animated works, the credits list the principal voices without assigning a detailed role-by-role breakdown, so the ensemble is introduced here by name rather than by character.
Context & significance
Running 17 minutes, The Girl In The River sits firmly in short-film territory, using animation's compressed storytelling to move a fable from its premise to its consequences without padding. The Animation, Drama, and Fantasy mix is typical of the genre's fairy-tale lineage, where a single fantastical rule, here the transformation of tears into pearls, carries the emotional and moral weight of the whole piece. Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski direct the Canadian production, working in a tradition of animated shorts that use fable structure to explore very adult themes in a compact runtime.
Watching The Girl In The River on Ktime
The Girl In The River is available with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, opening the film to Farsi-speaking viewers who prefer either option. The page itself is free to browse, and watching only requires logging into a K-Time account, on a platform whose Farsi-first design is built around the Iranian diaspora audience.