Written by Kianna Best on Aug 13, 2024. Posted in Awards and Festivals

Claude Barras honoured at Locarno Film Festival

Stop motion is the medium that transcends the tests of time, and Locarno Film Festival are recognising that with their honoring of Claude Barras. The master animator and creator of My Life as a Zucchini (Ma vie de Courgette)  will receive the Locarno Kida Award la Mobilaire at Locarno 77 today along with a screening of his latest film Sauvages.

Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director: “Claude Barras is one of the great shapers of the contemporary collective imagination. The Mélièsian brilliance of his animations links directly back to the origins of cinema, intertwining with the technological transformations of contemporary cinema. An artist with an inimitable touch from his earliest beginnings, Barras is the proponent of a civil and committed cinema whose work – both avant-garde and popular – has fostered a fertile intergenerational dialogue, placing the key nodes of our relationship with the world and the environment at the center of his actions. A poet and visionary, Claude Barras is a unique auteur in contemporary cinema: the Locarno Film Festival is honored to celebrate him on the Piazza Grande with the prestigious Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare.”

The Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare is a prize dedicated to a personality who has inspired a love for cinema in younger viewers, filling them with a sense of discovery about the wonders of the big screen. The award created in 2021 has previously honoured Mamoru Hosoda (2021), Gitanjali Rao (2022), and Luc Jacquet (2023).

My Life as a Zucchini (Ma vie de Courgette)  which premiered in 2016 is directed by Claude Barras, as well as Barra s alongside Céline Sciamma and Morgan Navarro. The film follows the life of a young bout who, after losing his mother, is sent to an orphanage with other orphans his age where he begins to learn the meaning of trust and true love. The film would go on to win two César Awards and being nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film in 2017. With such quick international success Barras would go on to collaborate with Navarro once again with Nancy Huston and create Sauvages. Sauvages touches on the realities of climate change and human destruction, following as Kéria, Selaï and the little primate, Oshi navigate the edge of a tropical forest in Borneo.  Animation was catered to by Beast Animation, Haut et court and Hélium Films and shot in Martigny in the canton of Valais.

“I like the idea of leaving something behind for the next generation, much like Swiss activist Bruno Manser did with his fight to protect the rainforest, by questioning the world,” Barras commented in interview for the festival.

The festival, which started on 7 August will conclude on Saturday 17 August.

Images courtesy of Locarno Film Festival