Les hirondelles de Kaboul
Zabou Breitman, Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec, France, Luxembourg, 2019o
The story of two couples in Kabul in 1998: The student couple Zunaira and Mohsen suffer under the Taliban's terror regime, which nips any expression of joie de vivre in the bud, forces women under the burqa and spreads fear and terror with arbitrary violence. The aging guerrilla fighter and prison guard Tarik, for his part, is trapped in marriage with his terminally ill wife, whom he once married out of gratitude instead of love. An incident with fatal consequences connects the lives of the four characters in a fearsome and miraculous way. - Adapted from the novel of the same name by Yasmina Khadras.
Some conditions are so appalling, the stories that emerge from them so sad that a naturalistic representation would be almost unbearable and stylization is necessary. Yet it is precisely this abstraction and reduction, which often contains the magic of art, that can give rise to its own poetry, such as a paradoxical beauty in the depiction of horror, as happens here when the French illustrator Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec transforms the scenes from the Kabul of terrible terror into enchanting pictures with fragile lines and the pastel shades of watercolour technique. The plot, probably due to the original, exerts some melodramatic effort, the punch line is foreseeable at some point, but this hardly diminishes the pull and attraction of this drama, in which humanity finally celebrates a quiet victory over monstrosity.
Andreas FurlerWie übersetzt man den Alltag einer Schreckensherrschaft in Bilder? Zabou Breitman und Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec entwerfen mit wasserfarbenen Animationen ein vielschichtiges Figurenkabinett. Durch den harten Kontrast zur Realität bringen sie damit eine zwischen Horror und Hoffnung mäandrierende Geschichte auf kunstvolle Weise zum Fliegen.
Hans Jürg ZinsliSi Les Hirondelles de Kaboul n'est pas parfait, il recèle suffisamment de grandes qualités pour emporter totalement l'adhésion du spectateur. Récit terriblement émouvant d'une révolte à priori impossible, il nous ramène face à nos engagements et à nos doutes. Face à notre désir de révolte aussi et nous invite à choisir la seule voie possible, celle du coeur. Avec toutes les conséquences que cela implique...
Christophe FoltzerFilm d'animation étonnant, qui bénéficie d'une méthode de fabrication inédite -les comédiens ont été filmés puis redessinés et animés-, Les Hirondelles de Kaboul doit sa réussite à son scénario adapté du roman de Yasmina Khadra, à sa mise en scène et au jeu de ses comédiens.
La RédactionGalleryo
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