Linda e il pollo
12 May 2024 | 17:00
Sala Hera — Cinema Astra
Paulette realises that she has unfairly punished her daughter Linda. To make up for it, she promises to cook her a chicken with peppers, even though she can’t cook at all. But where to find a chicken on a day when all the stores have decided to strike and are closed?
The tension inherent to such a paroxysmal reality as narrated by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach’s deliberately sketchy animation shows us a familiar world of contradictions and references to Italian interior cinema. The impossible search for the family as a community sharpens the conflict of this sweet and precious work, where ritual warms and frightens at the same time.
Production: Dolce Vita Films, Miyu Productions, Palosanto Films, France 3 Cinéma
Regia di Chiara Malta, Sébastien Laudenbach
75'
Italy, France
2023
Chiara Malta has directed several short films presented and awarded in numerous international festivals. After the documentary Armando e la politica for La Lucarne Arte/ZDF, she became resident artist at Villa Medici. Her first feature film, Simple Women with Jasmine Trinca and Elina Löwensohn, opened the Discovery section of the Toronto Film Festival in 2019.
Linda e il pollo, her first animated feature film, won the Cristal at Annecy and was nominated for the EFA’s five-year run, and received the Cesar 2024 for best animated film. In France she regularly directs episodes of the series Un si grand soleil for France TV. In Italy she directed the first season of the series Antonia, produced by Grøenlandia and Fidelio for Amazon Prime.
Sébastien Laudenbach teaches at the Arts Decoratifs in Paris. He experiments with animation through sand, paper cutting, volume and drawing. His experiments have lead him to the cryptokinographic method (literally “writing hidden in movement”), a process for representing the figure on the screen in motion. His free, spaced, flashing, colourful, often improvised animation, which explodes shapes and colours to make them malleable, lives on in his feature film The Girl Without Hands, which he drew by himself for 9 months.