A Boat in the Garden | Slocum et moi
Jean-François Laguionie
Luxemburg/France | 2024 | 75′ | V.O.S.I. | Italian Premiere
In the early 1950s, on the banks of the Marne River, François, an 11-year-old boy, is intrigued to discover that his parents are building a boat in their small garden, a replica of the sailboat of the famous sailor Joshua Slocum. As the years pass, in post-war France, François passes from adolescence to adulthood. As the boat is being built, and with a tender and poetic look at his mother and father, the boy embarks on his adventure, which will take him along his own passionate route of the sea and drawing.
Director: Jean-François Laguionie
Script: Anik Le Ray, Jean-François Laguionie
Storyboard: Jean-François Laguionie
Layout: Stéphane Nedez, Johanna Bessière
Sets: Laurence Gavroy
Animation: Gilles Rudziak
Music: Pascal Le Pennec
Role: Elias Hauter, Grégory Gadebois, Coraly Zahonero, André Marcon, Mathilde Lamusse, Lara Ropion, Jérémy Prevost
Compositing: Alexis Poligné
Artistic direction: Pascal Gèrard
Distribution: Gebeka Films, Valérie Yendt, Reginald De Guillebon, Urban Sales, Frederic Corvez
Producers: Melusine Productions / Studio 352, Stéphan Roelants, JPL Films, Jean-François Bigot, Camille Raulo
Jean-François Laguionie weaves a delicate and beautiful work about the metaphorical journey of a family of three who build a boat in their garden during the post-war period
“I had around me the entire universe, which I now considered a true friend.” It is an inner navigation guide, an astral map that traces the ways in which everyday life can be transformed through the power of imagination, but also an affectionate exploration of the unsaid in family relationships and the (non-nostalgic) memories of shared moments, at the crossroads of individual trajectories, that the French director Jean-François Laguionie (known in particular for Le Château des singes, L’Île de Black Mór, Le Tableau, Louise en hiver) proposes in the entirely harmonious film Slocum et moi, presented in the Official Selection of the 77th Cannes Film Festival and currently in the Official Competition at the 43rd Annecy Animated Film Festival.
“I will try to outline for you my father’s journey. I was ten years old when he embarked on this adventure.” In front of his easel at the Arts Deco, the adolescent François returns to 1949, when ration cards were still in force, in a small town on the edge of the Marne, not far from the Noisiel chocolate factory, when the suburbs of Paris still flirted with the countryside. In a quiet street, three kilometers from the river, the family home is about to witness a revolution in the garden and François’ life will open up to new horizons. In fact, not only does he discover that he is not the biological son of his father Pierre, a taciturn salesman and easy-going jack-of-all-trades, but he also learns that the latter has a secret passion that revolves around the book Alone, Around the World by the American writer Joshua Slocum, who was the first to sail solo around the world aboard the Spray – a 37-foot wooden sloop – in the space of three years, two months and two days, between April 1895 and June 1898.
And now François’ father has decided to undertake the construction of an almost exact replica of the boat (although slightly smaller due to the size of the garden; in other words, 11.2 metres long and 4.32 metres wide). It is an extraordinary home shipbuilding project that lasts until 1955 and involves his wife Geneviève and their son, because in addition to being a manual enterprise it is also a labor of love…
With good humor, imagination, poetry, bicycles, outdoor cafés and gypsy jazz, an island in the Marne that hosts first loves, the BHV and the Paris Maritime Museum and cinema with Gary Cooper in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Invincibles, an entire era is delicately brought to light in Slocum et moi. But the film gracefully avoids any melancholic attachment to the past by anchoring itself in the universal, that is, in the sense of observation and the ability to listen of a boy who wants to love and be loved by his father, but who is also growing up. And by inserting into this familiar story the escapes into the ocean in the company of the real Joshua Slocum, the brilliant screenplay (written by the director with his usual accomplice Annick Le Ray) offers us a gentle and enchanting journey on three levels (François’ awakening, his father’s dream and the world tour from the Strait of Magellan to the trade winds), in the form of a sensitive animation that plays with light and shadow and the subtle art of charcoal and which is accompanied by the beautiful music of Pascal Le Pennec. At 84, Jean-François Laguionie is a true master whose apparent modesty does not hide his immense talent, as if “the wall that closed around the boat had simply given it more freedom”.
Review by Fabien Lemercier
Jean-François Laguionie
Jean-Francois Laguionie is a French screenwriter, director, producer and animator.
Since he was a boy, Laguionie has been passionate about shadow theater, scenography and cinema. A student of Paul Grimalt, he made his first three animated shorts thanks to the famous French director and animator: “La demoiselle et le violoncelliste” (1965), Grand Prix at the Annecy Festival; “L’arche de Noé” (1967); “Une bombe par hasard…” (1969). In 1978, he participated in competition at the Cannes Film Festival with the animated short “La Traversée de l’Atlantique à la rame”. The film was awarded the Palme d’Or for best short and, in 1979, received a César.
Laguionie’s first animated feature film was “De l’autre côté de l’image” (1984).
In 1985, Laguionie founded his own studio and production company, La Fabrique. In the same year, Laguionie wrote and directed the film “Gwen, le livre de sable”, which won the French critics’ prize at the 1985 Annecy Film Festival.
Other internationally successful films followed: “La tela animata” (2011) and “Les seasons de Louise” (2016).
He also worked for television and, in 1996, Laguionie co-directed the animated TV series “Billy the Cat” (1996-2001).
In 2019, the director presented the animated film “Le voyage du prince” in Annecy and was awarded the Cristal d’Honeur for his career.
In 2024 he presented his latest work “A boat in the garden (Slocum et moi)” in Cannes and Annecy, a film that was presented, for the first time in Italy, at the Imaginaria festival in Conversano in the presence of the director who received the Lifetime Achievement Award.
