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My Life as a Courgette
A neglected 9-year-old boy lands in a rural home for orphans, where he finds that everyone has a personal story to rival his own. Written in episodic monologue, Gilles Paris’ novel Autobiography of a Courgette (2002) is retold in a “stop motion” film that captivated audiences around the world. Trained in illustration and computer graphics,…
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire
This classical yet radical romantic period drama set shortly before the French Revolution is the fourth feature from 40 year old French auteur Celine Sciamma, who has described it as a “manifesto on the female gaze”. Sciamma has described the film’s title as deliberately evoking the work of a writer she loves, Henry James, “who…
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Transit
Transit is based on a 1944 novel by German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers, who draws on her own experience as a refugee. Petzold situates the drama in an historically indeterminate moment, superimposing past and present. There are no period trappings; the opening sirens could be sounding today, and the soldiers storming Paris look like contemporary French…