The Swiss filmmaker Claude Barras's debut feature film – the stop-motion animation "My Life as a Courgette" (2016) – was nominated for an Oscar. Now he is back with a follow-up, and it is just as distinctive as its predecessor.
Once again, he has populated a "quirky handcrafted world" with expressive, clay-sculpted figures reminiscent of childhood drawings, said Dan Jolin on Time Out. But whereas the first movie was a tragi-comedy that played out in a children's care home in Switzerland, this one takes place on the island of Borneo, where schoolgirl Kéria (Babette De Coster) has moved with her widowed father (Benoît Poelvoorde), so that he can take up a job with a palm oil company.
Kéria's father is Swiss, but her late mother was a member of a local indigenous community, the Penan, said Graeme Virtue in the Big Issue. Kéria seems "disconnected" from this part of her heritage; but she bonds with a young orangutan that has been orphaned by the loggers. Then, one of her cousins is sent to stay with them to get him away from the protests against the palm oil giant's deforestation efforts. When he flees back to his home in the rainforest, taking the ape with him, she pursues him – and so learns about Penan culture, and the threats to their way of life.
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