Like every summer, Louise, 9 years old, is entrusted to her grandparents for a few days of vacation in the countryside. Between the green grass in the garden, swimming in the lake, fishing with grandpa, everything seems as sweet as grandma’s strawberry pies. Even the walks with his grandfather in the forest after dark, to listen to the cries of the animals.
Filled with metaphors, “Pachyderm deals with incest and traumatic amnesia through metaphorical evocation and the poetic force that animation allows to deploy,” explains the production of the short film. After winning the prize for best animated short film at the Foyle Film Festival, Stéphanie Clément’s work is in the running to win the Oscar during the ceremony which takes place on Sunday March 10 in Los Angeles. “Beyond the joy of knowing the film has been selected, what would be great would be to bring it to widespread visibility,” affirmed its screenwriter and producer Marc Rius to the newspaper La Provence.
“Stéphanie Clément’s film is as beautiful as it is powerful and, without pretension, we consider it as a work of public interest which can help free speech,” declared Marc Rius during the preview. For her part, the director talks about a subject that is “close to her heart”. “Intrafamily violence is really something that concerns me greatly. My way of talking about it is through animation, through images in general. I’m not very comfortable with words, I’m not really a literary person, but I can speak through images,” she explains to BFMTV.
At the Oscars, Pachyderm is competing against four other animated short films: Letter to a Pig by Tal Kantor and Amit R. Gicelter, Ninety-Five Senses by Jerusha Hess and Jared Hess, Our Uniform by Yegane Moghaddam and War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John
The animated short film Pachyderme is available on Arte.TV.