Career Honor 2024 to Jean-François Laguionie
> Cloister of San Benedetto | h.10.00 pm | Thursday, August 22nd
He is one of the world masters of animated cinema, awarded the Crystal for Lifetime Achievement at the Annecy Film Festival in 2021, the Frenchman Jean-François Laguionie, born in 1939, is the author of nine short films and seven feature films in more than fifty years of his career. His first film, La Demoiselle et le violoncelliste (The Lady and the Cellist), a short film, produced by his teacher Paul Grimault, dates back to 1965. You can already recognize his love for the ocean, nature and music, which will be found in all of his films.
He won the Palme d’Or for the short film La Traversée de l’Atlantique à la copper (The Rowing Crossing of the Atlantic) at Cannes in 1978, a grotesque odyssey into a still time. In 1985 his first feature film was released, after five years of work, Gwen, le livre de sable (Gwen, or of the book of sand), an extraordinary adventure set in an apocalyptic world invaded by sand, produced by La Fabrique Production, a studio animation founded by the filmmaker himself.
This is followed by Le Château des singes (A Monkey’s Tale, 1999), loosely based on The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, then by L’Île de Black Mór (Black Mor’s Island, 2004), a pirate story that takes inspiration from readings and from the imagination of Laguionie’s childhood. Then he created Le Tableau (The Painting, 2011), an astonishing journey into the world of painting and in 2016 Louise en hiver (Louise by the Shore), a delicate poem steeped in memories, nostalgia and memory.
In 2019, Le Voyage du Prince (The Prince’s Voyage ), directed together with Xavier Picard, takes us to a planet of apes to offer us a clear vision of what civilization is or is not: a true anti-racist and ecological manifesto.
His latest work is Slocum and I (Slocum et Moi), presented at Cannes and at the Annecy Festival, will be an Italian Premiere at Imaginaria 2024.
«Towards which magnetic pole are Jean-François Laguionie’s fantastic journeys attracted? From the sands of Gwen to the abandoned seaside resort of Louise en hiver, from the rainforest of the Château des singes to the Venetian maze of the Tableau, Laguionie crosses, like a sort of John Houston, both the space of great solitudes and the theatrical scene of human comedy , with an identical form of absence and justification. Like a ship that evades combat and turns offshore, this cinema aims less at a destination than at an elsewhere, at a perpetual movement, at an absolute wandering, that of life itself which, perhaps, ends only in a final shipwreck . An empty boat, covered in algae and shells, at the end of La Traversée de l’Atlantique à la copper; an elderly lady named Louise who, having missed the last train, has to spend the winter alone by the sea…“. (Xavier Kawa-Topor, general delegate of NEF Animation)
Filmography:
1965: La Demoiselle et le violoncelliste (The Lady and the Cellist) (short)
1969: Une Bombe par hasard (A Random Bomb) (short)
1971: Plage privée (Private Beach) (short)
1978: Rowing Across the Atlantic (La Traversée de l’Atlantique à la rame) (short)
1985: Gwen, or the Book of Sand (Gwen, le livre de sable) (feature film)
1999: A Monkey’s Tale (Le Château des singes) (feature film)
2003: Black Mor’s Island (L’Île de Black Mór) (feature film)
2011: The Painting (Le Tableau) (feature film)
2016: Louise by the Shore (Louise en hiver) (feature film)
2019: The Prince’s Voyage (Le Voyage du Prince) (feature film)
2024: Slocum and I (Slocum et Moi) (feature film)