As with “My Life as a Zucchini” in 2016, Valais director Claude Barras will present his new film at the Cannes Film Festival in May. An ecological fable set in Borneo, “Sauvages” will be screened during the Young Audience Sessions.
A second film will be offered “to the young (and less young) audience of Cannes 2024”, specifies the festival on the social network X: “Angelo, in the mysterious forest” by Vincent Paronnaud and Alexis Ducord. In addition to the tribute to Studio Ghibli, the Official Cannes Selection includes six animated films, notes the festival.
“My life as a zucchini”, which attracted nearly 100,000 spectators in Switzerland and around a million in France, immediately won the honors of the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes. “A screening in Cannes to start the release of a film is something quite extraordinary,” Claude Barras told Keystone-ATS.
Need for co-productions
The director will travel to Cannes while Switzerland is the guest of honor at the Film Market. Claude Barras welcomes this recognition of Swiss cinema, “which goes through ups and downs because we are a small country, with a fragmented market due to languages.”
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“To make a stop motion animated film, if we take into account budgets and audiences, we cannot confine ourselves to Switzerland,” he continues. Thus “Sauvages” is a co-production, involving three countries (Switzerland, France, Belgium), with a budget of 12 to 13 million francs for a duration of one hour and a half. “Ma vie de Courgette” (Switzerland, France), shorter, around an hour, had a lower budget, 7 to 8 million.
For “Sauvages”, “we collaborated with partners active in the same techniques, stop motion, in France and Belgium. It was also interesting from a creative point of view”, continued the 51-year-old from Valais, who came barely finished his second animated feature film.
>> To see, a subject produced on the set of “Sauvages”:
More than 300 people on this film
In total, more than 300 people worked on this film, but not all at the same time. At the height of filming, there were 50 people in Martigny (VS).
The adventure for Claude Barras began in 2017 with the drawing of the baby orangutan. He then spent a year at Groupe Ouest, a script incubator for first films in Finistère in Brittany. “At the end of this year of writing, I arrived at a first version of the script, which allowed me to meet producers.” A rewriting phase followed with Catherine Paillé to result in the current film.
In the footsteps of Bruno Manser
“Sauvages” is an ecological fable that takes place in the heart of the tropical forest. Like many Swiss of his generation, Claude Barras was strongly influenced by Bruno Manser and his fight to defend the life of the Penans, a community of hunter-gatherers in the forest of Borneo.
The environmental activist from Basel disappeared in 2000 in Malaysia at the age of 45. Since then, things have hardly improved on the ground, with Indonesia continuing to deforest. It is currently building a new capital Nusantara in the middle of the forest in the east of the island of Borneo to replace Jakarta, considered too vulnerable to earthquakes.
However, no location is mentioned in the film, which is aimed at a family audience and children aged seven to eight, as with “My Life as a Zucchini”.
ats/olhor
