Lux Film Days showcases cinema as diverse as Europe

Making a film that appeals to both kids and adults remains a challenge for most filmmakers, and they could all take a clue from Claude Barras. The Swiss filmmaker’s animated feature debut Ma vie de Courgette (My Life as a Courgette) is by turns delightful and disturbing.

When 10-year-old Courgette (not his real name) loses his only parent, he must enter a home for kids even more troubled than he. As each child’s history unfolds, families face subjects they don’t often find in children’s cinema fare. Fortunately, adversity is offset by kindness, and the stop-motion animation, with its big potato-shaped heads and bright shocks of hair, helps keep things whimsical.

All this was enough to get Courgette (pictured) a nomination for the Lux Film Prize, the European parliament’s annual nod to the best in European cinema of the last year. The prize is meant to promote cinema across the 28 member states and encourage co-productions but also to create conversations around EU policies and values.

As part of Lux Film Days, Bozar in Brussels will screen Courgette together with the other two nominees. A peine j’ourvre les yeux (As I Open My Eyes), a co-production of four countries, including Belgium, is Tunisian director Leyla Bouzid’s feature debut, and the director will be in Bozar to talk about it. It’s a beauty of a movie, showcasing Tunis’ vivid colours and pulsing rhythms in streets and nightclubs.

The film is an interesting take on the young-woman-rebelling-against-tradition genre, as the young woman in question is not being steered towards marriage but medical school. Still, she’s determined to be a singer and live life on the edge.

German director Maren Ade’s multiple-award-winning Toni Erdmann, meanwhile, has rather taken Europe by storm, with critics and audiences responding enthusiastically to the occasionally hilarious but largely painful scenario of an older man desperate to connect with his distant, driven daughter.

15-16 November, Bozar, Brussels. Photo: Rita Productions/Blue Spirit Productions/Gebeka Films