OCS Pulp
Tuesday, October 17 – 9 p.m.
Film d’animation
Among the Ughettos, we have colossus hands. Hands like we don’t make anymore. From the hands of those who have devoted themselves to working the land with few means. In his second animated film, Jury Prize at the 2022 Annecy Festival, Alain Ughetto (director of Jasmine in 2013) recounts this heritage which gave him a taste for manual work. Through a fictional dialogue with his “grandma”, he reconstructs the murderous life of his grandparents, farmers born at the end of the 19th century in Italian Piedmont.
Shot in stop motion (frame-by-frame animation) with puppets, which gives it a more touching artisanal side than the digitally polished figures, Forbidden to Dogs and Italians, released in cinemas in January, takes the side of the handmade to evoke the simplicity of the daily lives of Cesira and Luigi Ughetto. The decorations are made from raw materials. Broccoli are trees; charcoal, from the mountains; sugar cubes, brick walls…
Poor living conditions and the rise of fascism push Luigi to leave Piedmont in the hope of providing a better life for his family in France. Like hundreds of thousands of other migrants, the father and his sons will build the country’s infrastructure: tunnels, roads, bridges, dams. Before reaching their “paradise”, they are greeted by the sign: “No dogs or Italians allowed. »
Hosting the imagination
Filmed in live action, the director’s hand delicately comes into contact with those of the puppets. In comparison, these become tiny, revealing a certain form of Herculean fragility. In these sequences where two levels of reality intertwine, the manipulation takes back its original meaning here, going against the influence and control of influence which it echoes today: the hand of the director reconstructs the past , without overhanging, taking care not to betray the gestures of the elders.
If we usually read the future in the palm of our hand, Alain Ughetto does exactly the opposite. He manages to create a “heterotopia”, as described by the philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984): a physical place capable of housing the imagination. In his filmed essay, there is no question of clairvoyance. He unearths his origins and those of hundreds of other Italian migrant families. “We don’t come from a country, we come from our childhood,” says “grandma” Cesira. On closer inspection, their giant hands appear as soft and chubby as those of newborns.
A tribute to manual labor, both in its roughness and in its creativity, the film does not show the cuts or cracks. It celebrates its heritage through hands which, beyond work and the passing of time, have kept the innocence of their birth.
