Winner of the best animated film at the last César as well as at the European Cinema Prizes, the formidable Josep, directed by Aurel (Aurélien Froment), designer for The world and The chained Duck, is finally released in our theaters on Friday. To salute: its immense historical and artistic charge.
Interviewed by Zoom in Paris, its author, also comic book documentary maker and author of graphic reports, delivered his first feature film in this film, received with honors. From the start, the Cannes Film Festival offered him its “Official Selection” label for the 2020 ghost edition. COVID-19 or not, his film will have started off under good auspices.
Josep discusses the fate of designer and caricaturist Josep Bartolí, born in 1910 in Barcelona. This leftist militant, exiled in France in 1939 after the civil war – like half a million Spaniards of the Retirada fleeing Francoism via the Pyrenees – was prisoner in seven French camps which parked these migrants in shameful conditions. Soon escaped, sent to Dachau (but he jumped off the train), he settled in Mexico, becoming intimate with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Finally emigrated to the United States where he met Pollock and Kooning, the man, who died in New York in 1995 too little known, had exceptional talent, courage and temperament. For him, drawing was a weapon.
“About ten years ago, I discovered Bartolí’s work late in the day, which impressed me in every sense of the word,” explains Aurel. Its passage in the French camps evoked by its burning drawings makes it possible to recall a hidden episode. We don’t know anything about these people, but some helped them escape. Josep cited and drew them. His universe imposed itself on me. “
From pencil to light
The French designer was afraid of getting too close to the work of his model, which he admired. “It was necessary to show it on the screen with my weapons, by differentiating our two graphic worlds. I’m not as good as Bartolí and I didn’t have any animation skills. He needed a drawing that was not his hand. For the first part, my proposal is rather that of comics: to summarize an action in a drawing. I plunged into that world. “
It was based with its co-scriptwriter, Jean-Louis Milesi, on a work by Bartolí’s nephew with many unknowns. From real facts and testimonies (from the nephew, his former companion in Barcelona and his widow in particular), extrapolating the rest, he created the character of a young contemporary designer without social conscience. This grandson of a gendarme, who would have once helped Josep to escape from a camp, would become the ferryman of the artist’s destiny stuck to the great dramas of the twentiethe century. Josep’s story also came to life, notably through the voices of Sergi López, David Marsais, Silvia Pérez Cruz.
“The scenario was complex and rolled over several eras,” says Aurel. Each of them is determined by a graphic style. In the camps, there are no colors. I was inspired by the style of Bartolí, who drew there in pencil. In Mexico, he made multicolored paintings. The light appeared, and the whole chromatic scale. Later he dropped the line and painted masses and colors. My film thus walks through styles. “
Between confinements, Josep took the poster in the fall of a month in France, also in Spain, where it received a triumphant reception. “It was beyond all my hopes. This film gave me great professional and media recognition, ”he admits.
Aurel declares to go where the wind pushes him. He has several strings to his bow and still does not know whether his next work will be an animation or a graphic novel. But his name shines very brightly thanks to Josep, now Caesarized on top of that.
All the more so since this adventure of a Spanish exile from the civil war necessarily evokes the hordes of migrants who knock today on the doors of the countries of Europe and North America, also parked. Parallels are drawn in the mind of the spectator, adding to the timeliness of the film. Because history has the unfortunate tendency to repeat itself.
Josep premieres on December 10.