My Life as a Zucchini: Tournées Film Festival

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.