First introduced in 2021 during Giona Nazzaro’s inaugural year as Artistic Director, the Locarno Kids Award celebrates the work of filmmakers whose art is particularly capable of reaching younger viewers — who have their own bespoke section in Locarno and workshops training them to become the cinephiles of tomorrow. After Mamoru Hosoda (Japan), Gitanjali Rao (India) and Luc Jacquet (France), this is the first time the award is being given to a Swiss director: Claude Barras, whose features My Life as a Zucchini and Sauvages have enriched the country’s small but well-respected animation scene.
It’s also the second tip of the hat this year to the art of animation at a Swiss festival, after the Solothurn Film Festival, which focuses on national cinema, devoted a retrospective to the Studio GDS group in January.
Born in Sierre, in the canton of Valais, Barras studied illustration and digital animation in France and Switzerland (one of the schools he attended was named after Émile Cohl, one of the pioneers of the animated artform). His first short film was Banquise in 2005, with Cédric Louis as co-director. That early work, which also screened in Cannes in 2006, is one of six shorts directed and/or produced by Barras that Locarno is showing in the Kids sidebar as part of the tribute. Additionally, he produced Elie Chapuis’ Canard, which is competing in the national strand of this year’s short films selection.
Barras’s major breakthrough came in 2016 with his first feature, My Life as a Zucchini (also playing in the Kids program), for which he co-wrote the script with acclaimed French filmmaker Céline Sciamma. First unveiled in Cannes at the Directors Fortnight, that stop-motion gem went on to win the Cristal for Best Feature Film in Annecy and was a major hit worldwide, with almost 180,000 admissions in Switzerland alone. As of 2023, it is the 25th most successful cinematic release in the country’s history, and the most successful animated film.
It was also the national submission for the Oscars in the International Feature Film category that year, making the December shortlist, in addition to being nominated for Best Animated Feature. Quite the achievement for a (comparatively) smaller European film with a far from cheerful premise (the main character is sent to an orphanage after accidentally causing his mother’s death).
“Claude Barras is proof that Swiss feature-length animation is feasible, and has the potential to achieve success internationally,” says Isabelle Favez, another acclaimed Swiss animator, talking to TFV. The first half of her sentence is particularly resonant, in the context of an audiovisual landscape that is very rich and promising, but not without its problems.
As explained to this writer by Geneva-based animator Marcel Barelli in 2022, the main reason Switzerland doesn’t release an animated feature every year is tied to the way the government assigns funding to the arts: only short form animation has its own allocated budget, while any federal contributions to feature-length projects must be taken from the funds meant for fiction films in general. “That means, in the year we both applied, they agreed to help finance my first feature and Claude’s second,” Barelli said at the time. “There was no room for a third pitch.”
That second project from Barras became Sauvages. This environmentally conscious coming-of-age story had its world premiere in Cannes as a Special Screening. It also played at Annecy before arriving in Locarno for its Swiss premiere on the gargantuan Piazza Grande screen. This was eight years after Zucchini failed to make the cut (a historical footnote: Carlo Chatrian, who was in charge of the selection at the time, openly admitted to having a disagreement with the distributor over the preferred slot for the film). Sauvages is scheduled to open in cinemas in the fall, perhaps adding to the conversation about how to enrich the animation scene in Switzerland which, much like the young characters in Barras’s films, has all the right qualities to make its way into the larger world.
