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Tournées Film Festival: Ma vie de courgette (My Life as a Zucchini)

November 02, 2017
06:45 PM - 08:45 PM
Hoyt Auditorium

Synopsis

Though bravely realistic, Swiss director Claude Barras’s charming stopmotion animated film is an unexpectedly uplifting look at childhood tragedy. After his alcoholic mother’s death, nine-year-old Icare—known to his friends as Zucchini—is placed in a group home where he soon forms alliances and rivalries with a group of kids in equally difficult circumstances, including the son of drug addicts and the daughter of a deported refugee. But it takes the arrival of the recently orphaned Camille for Zuchini to know he has found a friend for life. Which means that when Camille’s nasty aunt appears to take her away, the kids band together to find a way to keep her at the home. Though Barras and screenwriter Céline Sciamma (a powerhouse of contemporary French cinema as the writer/director of international hit Girlhood) never pull punches in describing the challenges faced by their characters, My Life as a Zucchini is imbued with a real-life sense of childhood wonder, both through its inventive animation and its commitment to exclusively telling the story from the children’s perspective. The result is a marvelously nuanced, finely crafted depiction of childhood, as appealing to young people as adults. Following a triumphant premiere at the Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, My Life as a Zucchini wooed general audiences in France with its idiosyncratic style and bold treatment of its subject. It has since been nominated for a 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Director

Claude Barras

Screenplay

Céline Sciammma

Cast (Voices)

FRENCH Version: 
Gaspard Schlatter 
Sixtine Murate 
Paulin Jaccoud 
Michel Vuillermoz

ENGLISH Version: 
Will Forte 
Nick Offerman 
Ellen Page 
Amy Sedaris

Details

French 
68 min. 
France, Switzerland, 2016

Distributor

GKIDS

Tournées Film Festival - Fall 2017

Category: Film Screenings