Filmmaker Claude Barras Gets Animated in Cannes with Stop-Motion Feature ‘Sauvages’

Scott Roxborough
·5 min read
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Eight years after his stop-motion breakout debut My Life as a Zucchini, which premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight, Swiss director Claude Barras is back at the Cannes Film Festival this year with Sauvages (Savages).

My Life as a Zucchini was an Academy Award nominee in 2017, and Barras’ new feature is, if anything, even more ambitious. It tells the story of Kéria, an 11-year-old girl who lives with her father, a Swiss ethnologist who now works for a logging company, in the rural suburbs of the province of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo. She’s a typical urban girl, who loves her cell phone, hip-hop music and all things modern. She has largely turned her back on the traditions of her late mother, who was a member of the Penan, a nomadic group of hunter-gatherers whose way of life is threatened by industrial deforestation. But when her father rescues a baby orangutan, Kéria begins to reconnect to her Indigenous roots, as well as her Penan cousin Selaï.

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Sauvages will premiere in Cannes’ Young Audiences sidebar, the section that helped launch Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams last year, kicking off that film’s triumphant awards season run, which ended with its surprise Oscar nomination. Anton is selling Sauvages worldwide, and Anatomy of a Fall producer Haut et Court will release the film in France.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Sauvages’ world premiere, Barras discussed the real-life inspiration behind the movie and how he worked with the Penan in Borneo to craft the film.

Despite the action taking place 7,000 miles from your home in Switzerland, Sauvages feels like a very personal movie.

Yes, I grew up in the Swiss Alps, but my grandparents were farmers, with a lot of animals and a strong connection to nature, living in a very simple way. My parents were farmers, too, but they embraced modernity. In the 1980s, they started using a lot of fertilizers, a lot of pesticides on their vineyards, because they were growing monocultured grapes. I was a kid at that time, and I saw how all the animals, all the plants, all that diversity, just disappeared from our vineyard. It was a real subject of conflict between me and my parents. I think the film stems from that.

The other thing that was important in the development of this story was a man called Bruno Manser. He was Swiss and one of the world’s first environmental activists. He lived for 10 years in Borneo and did a lot to raise awareness in Switzerland and across Europe of the struggles of the Native peoples there against industrialization and palm oil exploitation.

Colonialism and Western exploitation are major themes in the film. How concerned were you that, as a Swiss white man, you’d be seen as a new colonialist, as expropriating the story of the Penan?

That was a big challenge for me. I was really conscious that I had to find the right angle and the right place from which to tell this story if I was to avoid cultural appropriation. This really is my story — I felt confident telling it from that perspective. And then I had the great luck to meet two of only three Penan people who live in France: Nelly Tungan, who accompanied Bruno Manser to Europe in the 1980s, married a Frenchman and now lives in Dijon, and her daughter, Sailyvia Paysan. They showed me a lot of photographs of their community and their lives. The film was really well documented. We also had a delegation of Penan on set during the shooting who could step in and stop anything that wasn’t right. Obviously, I’m the director of this film and it is my story, but I tried to be as careful and respectful as possible at every stage to make sure we got it right.

I’m the director and I’ll be in Cannes with this film, but we are also bringing Nelly and Sailvia and some of the Penan people involved in the production to France, and they should be in the spotlight. We really want this film to be a window into the fight of these people for their rights and for their land.

In your designs, I noticed a strong resemblance between the humans and the orangutans, especially between Kéria and her pet: They really do look like mother and daughter.

Humans share 99 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and 97 percent with the great apes. So there’s a strong family resemblance. For me, the great force and beauty of the human brain lies in its ability to create language, to speak, to narrate. This ability of imagination is a great force, but also a great weakness because the imagination of progress is also what is threatening nature’s survival, and our survival with it. So we have to find ways, imagine ways, to undo what we have done, to imagine a way that will give our children a future.

Your film shows a lot of the devastation of deforestation, but it ends on a hopeful, even optimistic, note. Why did you want to end the film that way? 

During the making of the movie, there was real-world progress, real victories. A new government was elected in Sarawak and the Penan, with the help of local lawyers, actually succeeded in their fight against illegal logging. That really inspired me to put some light into the film. I also felt I had to give some hope because while, compared to the 1980s, only 10 percent of the original forest in Borneo remains,
we see in the areas that have been protected that the jungle is growing back. We can see the resilience of nature. So instead of weeping over what has been destroyed or disappeared, we need to fight for what remains. We need to fight to make sure the nature that is left can survive. Survive and regrow.

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