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Tournées Film Festival: Louise en hiver (Louise by the Shore)

October 26, 2017
06:45 PM - 08:45 PM
Hoyt Auditorium

Synopsis

When elderly widow Louise misses the last train out of the seaside resort she usually summers in, she finds herself stranded in a ghost town of empty buildings and waxing and waning tides. She soon becomes a genteel Robinson Crusoe, building a hut on the beach and settling in with a raggedy talking dog and the memories of her childhood. A rare example of animation primarily aimed at an adult audience, Louise by the Shore has been compared in the pages of French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma to an episode of The Twilight Zone revisited by Jacques Tati (with a hint of Proust for good measure). But this offbeat gem is truly one of a kind and a welcome reminder from French veteran Jean-François Laguionie that animation can be a medium for quiet lyricism and characters rarely given center stage in live action film. Voiced by French theater star Dominique Frot’s scratchy, measured singsong, with an evocative soundtrack of solo piano and occasional choral music, Louise by the Shore is a delightfully tranquil meditation on solitude and the passage of time, a profound antidote to the twenty-four-hour news cycle and other contemporary torments. It is animated using an innovative combination of traditional 2D animation and digital imaging to create the effect of gently but constantly shifting watercolors, perfectly suited to this poetic fantasy of offseason life by the sea.

Director

Jean-François Laguionie

Screenplay

Jean-François Laguionie

Cast

Dominique Frot 
Diane Dassigny 
Tom Anthony 
Jean-François Laguionie

Details

French 
75 min. 
Canada, France, 2016

Distributor

First Run Features

Tournées Film Festival - Fall 2017

Category: Film Screenings