After knowing each other for years, when acclaimed animator Florence Miailhle and producer Ron Dyens finally collaborated, the result was always going to be something special. Miailhle’s previous work has regularly been nominated and won at prestigious festivals such as Clermont-Ferrand, Annecy, and Cannes, with similar recognition at the César Awards. Meanwhile, Dyens, the co-founder of Sacrebleu Productions, produced last year’s Academy Award winning Best Animated Feature Flow, from Directors Notes alum Gints Zilbalodis. These two filmmakers with a remarkable pedigree did not disappoint when they delivered Papillon (Butterfly), which has been nominated for Best Animated Short Film at this year’s Oscars.
Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty, tragedy, triumph, and importance of Papillon. Beauty in a rare form of animation, using paint and glass to make a series of stunning oil paintings come to life in an inventive flurry of motion. Tragedy in that I was unaware of the story of Alfred Nakache, the Jewish Olympic swimmer sent to Auschwitz with his wife and daughter, and triumph in the way he was able to rebuild his life after he left there without them. And importance, as the film is a powerful warning as to how much of the dark political forces at work during that time are coming to the fore today. It was our pleasure to speak with Florence as part of DN’s Oscar Nominees interview series about her personal connection to the man who inspired this story, the unique and very much human methods she experimented with to capture it, and the collaborations that came together along the way to bring this incredible animation to life.
It is important now to remember stories like that of Nakache’s. Remembering times in history, like now, where regimes are in the process of sweeping away the most elementary of human rights.
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