Wednesday, February 7, 2018 in Oechsle Hall, 224

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.

Credits and Trailer

DIRECTOR
Claude Barras

SCREENPLAY
Céline Sciamma
CAST (Voices)

FRENCH Version:
Gaspard Schlatter
Sixtine Murate
Paulin Jaccoud
Michel Vuillermoz

ENGLISH Version:
Will Forte
Nick Offerman
Ellen Page
Amy Sedaris

DETAILS
Coming-of-Age, Animation, Family
French
68 min.
France, Switzerland, 2016
Blu-Ray, DCP

7 PM Wednesday, January 31 in Oechsle Hall, 224

In his magnificent fourth feature film, Abderrahmane Sissako
demonstrates his remarkable ability to thoroughly condemn religious
fanaticism and intolerance with subtlety and restraint. Timbuktu
concerns the jihadist siege of the Malian city of the title in 2012. A ragtag
band of Islamic fundamentalists, hailing from France, Saudi Arabia, and
Libya, among other nations, announce their increasingly absurd list of
prohibitions—no music, no sports, no socializing—via megaphone to
Timbuktu’s denizens, several of whom refuse to follow these strictures,
no matter the consequence. In one instance of such defiance, perhaps
Timbuktu’s most indelible scene, a group of boys “play” soccer with an
invisible ball; in another, a woman who has been sentenced to be flogged
for singing continues her song between lashes (her punishment depicted
discreetly). Upbraided by a local imam for entering a mosque with guns,
the jihadists reveal themselves to be men less concerned with the
teachings of the Koran than with enforcing draconian, and ever arbitrary,
law. As further proof of Sissako’s great compassion, even these horribly
misguided dogmatists are presented as multidimensional characters,
though the intolerant way of life they insist on is never less than criminal.

Trailer and Credits (FACE):

DIRECTOR
Abderrahmane Sissako

SCREENPLAY
Abderrahmane Sissako and Kessen Tall

CAST
Pino Desperado
Fatoumata Diawara
Abel Jafri
Toulou Kiki
Kettly Noël
Hichem Yacoubi

GENRE Drama
LANGUAGE Arabic, Bambara, French, English, Songhay, and Tamasheq
RUNNING TIME 100’
PRODUCTION France, Mauritania, 2014