Michel Hazanavicius , the Oscar-winning director of “The Artist,” makes a first foray into animation with “ The Most Precious of Cargoes ” which world premieres at the Cannes Film Festival on May 24. Adapted from Jean-Claude Grumberg’s bestselling novel, “The Most Precious of Cargoes” is the first animated feature to vie for a Palme d’Or since Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir” in 2008; and it will be the last movie watched by the competition jury, presided over by Greta Gerwig, before the closing ceremony. Hazanavicius developed the project for years and wrote the script with Grumberg, as well as created the drawings.
Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat created the original score. The drama intertwines the fate of a Jewish family, including newborn twins, deported to Auschwitz, with that of a poor and childless woodcutter couple living deep in a Polish forest. On the train to the death camp, the young father wraps one of his twins in a shawl and throws her off the train into the snow.
The lonely woodcutter woman, watching the trains go by in the hope that they’ll leave some resources behind, stumbles across the “cargo’ and discovers the little girl. She decides to take her home. “The Most Precious of Cargoes” is co-produced and represented internationally by Studiocanal which will release the movie in France on Nov.
20. It’s produced by Patrick Sobelman and Robert Guédiguian at France’s Ex Nihilo, as well as Florence Gastaud and Hazan.
