Cucalorus Film Festival

I went to see two different screenings at the Cucalorus Film Festival this year as per my Introduction to Production class’s assignment instructions. Both were screened in Thalian Hall. I had never been to Thalian Hall before this. It had a particularly lovely and posh interior. It was a look that bordered on the positively baroque with luxurious velveted red seats and various detailed decorations and paintings. The ornate interior certainly added to the atmosphere of the viewings, bolstering their gravity in the eyes of the viewers and underscoring the sense of prestige Cucalorus no doubt wishes attached to placement within the festival quite nicely.

MY LIFE AS A ZUCCHINI

The first of the two films I saw was a wonderful French animated film entitled My Life as a Zucchini. It was released in the U.S. earlier this year and in 2016 in France. Directed by Claude Barras, this film stands out to me from most other animated films by the heavy and serious nature of its content. The story focuses on the namesake character of Zucchini, or Courgette as the French would call him. With only his homemade kite to represent his father, Courgette lives a desolate life of fear and neglect with his alcoholic mother who litters the floor of their apartment home with a horde of empty beer cans. Entertaining himself, Courgette gathered these up one day and built a tower of them at the top of the attic stairs. They fall, and his mother infuriated begins to climb the ladder to beat him. Afraid, the boy closed the trapdoor just as his mother’s head begins to be visible in the entrance to the attic. The door cracks her head and we hear the sounds of her body falling to the floor below, followed by ominous silence. After this incident we cut to the small boy being interviewed by a police officer, Raymond, who introduces the boy to his new placement in a foster home. With his kite for his father and now an empty beer can to represent his mother, the film follows Courgette’s new life in the children’s home. We become familiar with his peers and their tragic stories, Courgette continues to develop his relationship with Raymond, and the complexity of the childrens’ attachment styles is explored in various poignant ways from one little girl’s indecision between the foster mom and her long awaited biological mother who at last comes for her, to the survivor’s guilt that Courgette and one of his best friends feel when they are offered a home with Raymond. All of these elements, together with the childrens’ direct and crass summation of their understanding of sex clearly demonstrate that this film is not a children’s film despite its sweet moments and innocuous appearance. It instead illustrates how the medium isn’t merely for children by default. It was a lovely experience watching this in the surroundings of Thalian Hall.

WORLD OF TOMORROW

The second of the screenings I saw was the strange strange World of Tomorrow, directed by Don Hertzfeldt. These, like My Life as a Zucchini demonstrated even more how animation is not, by its mere nature, automatically for children. Highly thought-provoking and chalk-full of complicated and tragic ideas and possibilities illustrated for us on screen with ironic simplicity, both of these films follow Emily Prime a young child with convincingly childlike and unfocused dialogue and some visitor from the distant future. In the first film, Emily is visited by a third generation clone of herself and in the second by that third generation clone’s backup that never inherited the memories and identity from it’s predecessor and so travelled back to the prime to copy the original. Supremely untroubled by the tragic news her visitors bring (of the end of the world and a pathetic path humanity travels) Emily Prime is a visual embodiment of living in the moment and not stressing over the future. As the visitors in the future never try to change the future but merely reconnect with and preserve the present, a moral of the story becomes apparent I think: live in the present.