Claude Barras, Swiss animator and filmmaker behind the beloved Oscar-nominated modern classic Ma vie de Courgette (My Life as a Zucchini, 2016) will be awarded the Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare given to personalities credited with bringing younger generations to cinema, at the 77th Locarno Film Festival.
Barras will also present his latest feature film Sauvages (2024) – which recently premiered in Cannes.
The Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare is a Locarno Film Festival prize dedicated to a personality who has inspired a love for cinema in younger viewers, filling them with a sense of discovery about the wonders of the big screen. Barras’ animations are exemplary in this regard, aspiring to a socially conscious form of filmmaking that nonetheless remains endlessly entertaining and exquisitely crafted.
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director said, “Claude Barras is one of the great shapers of the contemporary collective imagination. The Mélièsian brilliance of his animations links directly back to the origins of cinema, intertwining with the technological transformations of contemporary cinema. An artist with an inimitable touch from his earliest beginnings, Barras is the proponent of a civil and committed cinema whose work – both avant-garde and popular – has fostered a fertile intergenerational dialogue, placing the key nodes of our relationship with the world and the environment at the center of his actions. A poet and visionary, Claude Barras is a unique auteur in contemporary cinema: the Locarno Film Festival is honored to celebrate him on the Piazza Grande with the prestigious Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare.”
The Locarno Kids Award la Mobiliare was created in 2021 and in previous editions went to Mamoru Hosoda (2021), Gitanjali Rao (2022), and Luc Jacquet (2023).
After debuting in 2016, Claude Barras’ beloved stop-motion comedy Ma vie de Courgette, co-written with Céline Sciamma, quickly achieved international success, winning two César Awards and being nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film in 2017. Together with Nancy Huston and Morgan Navarro, Barras began to develop the idea for a new animated feature the following year, which he then co-wrote with Catherine Paillé. The result is the long-anticipated Sauvages (2024), which will travel to Locarno after premiering at Cannes. About an Orangutan fighting to save the forests of Borneo with his friends, Barras’ latest animated work will have its Swiss premiere on the Piazza Grande on the evening of Tuesday, August 13 after the award ceremony for Barras, followed by a public conversation with the director the following morning.
In addition to Sauvages, Ma vie de Courgette and a selection of Barras’ early animated shorts will be presented as part of the Locarno Kids Screenings afternoon program.
Barras is currently developing a documentary series on excrement and an adaptation, co-written with Christelle Berthevas, of Fabien Toulmé’s comic strip It’s Not What I Was Expecting (Ce n’est pas toi que j’attendais).
The 77th Locarno Film Festival will take place from August 7 to 17, 2024.