Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius unveils debut animation film in Annecy

Washington [US], June 19 : The Oscar-winning director Michel Hazanavicius has unveiled his first-ever animation film at the 'Annecy International Animation Film Festival.'
Titled 'The Most Precious of Cargos,' the Hazanavicius directorial is an adaptation of the critically-acclaimed best-selling book by acclaimed French playwright and children's books author Jean-Claude Grumberg, who is also co-writing the film with Hazanavicius.
Told in the form of a classic fairy tale in 2D animation, it is set during World War II, and tells the story of a poor woodcutter and his wife who live deep in the Polish forest. To the woman's despair, the couple has no children. One day, while foraging for food, she sees a bundle fall out of what she believes to be a cargo train crossing the forest. Inside is a baby girl who was thrown from the train by her Jewish father; whose wife no longer has enough milk to feed both his twins, in the hope of saving them both. The woodcutter's wife decides to keep the precious cargo and raise her as her own against her husband's wishes, as per Variety.
Hazanavicius tackled the project more than three years ago, but the COVID19 pandemic had put him on hold, allowing him to make this year's Cannes opener, 'Final Cut,' in the meantime.
Hazanavicius, whose own family fled the Nazis in Eastern Europe, revealed that he was initially reluctant to accept the project but was deeply moved upon reading the book, which was also written by a long-time family friend.
Hazanavicius said, "The last survivors of the Holocaust are dying, soon there will no longer be any verbal testimonies of that period in time, we are moving into history with a capital 'H.'" "It is now open to fiction to tell these stories, which were sacred until now. Doing so through a fairy tale told in animation, which is the ultimate form of fiction, means taking responsibility for this entry into fiction; and it seemed like a noble venture to me," added the Director.
Audiences in Annecy were able to get a glimpse of the film that was shot in just two weeks with real actors in costumes, in which the director chose to give the animation team an accurate idea of each scene and speed up the pre-production process.
"Making a silent film helped me hugely," said Hazanavicius, referring to his Oscar-winning film 'The Artist'"
"I storyboard all my films because this enables me to have a purely graphic vision of what they will look like. There is very little dialogue in this film, so the role of the images is all the more important as they speak in place of the dialogue. My ambition is that if you cut out the sound you still understand the film," he added.
Scheduled for a 2024 release, "The Most Precious of Cargos" is a Franco-Belgian co-production between Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Les Films du Fleuve, Patrick Sobelman and Robert Guediguian's Paris-based Ex Nihilo, Florence Gastaud, Riad Sattouf and Hazanavicius' outfit Les Compagnons du Cinema and Hazanavicius' La Classe Americaine. Also, Studiocanal is handling worldwide sales.