The City of Lost Children

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's The City of Lost Children (La Cité des enfants perdus) opened in 1995, three years after their cult debut Delicatessen, and won two Césars including Best Cinematography (Darius Khondji) and Best Set Design (Marc Caro). The film became one of the most internationally distinctive French fantasy productions of the 1990s and consolidated Jeunet and Caro as the most visually distinctive French directorial collaboration of their generation, before they parted ways for separate careers.

In a fog-drenched industrial harbour city of indeterminate period, the deranged scientist Krank (Daniel Emilfork) (physically deteriorating because he is unable to dream) kidnaps neighbourhood children with the help of a religious cult, hoping to extract their dreams from their captured sleep. When his brother is taken, the gentle dock-worker strongman One (Ron Perlman, performing in French) sets out across the city with a small girl named Miette (Judith Vittet) to find the children. The film's design (a whaling ship in the harbour, brain-in-a-tank Cyclopes, an underwater clone factory) establishes the steampunk-grotesque aesthetic that anticipates much of the next two decades' fantasy cinema.

Khondji's photography of artificially constructed harbour exteriors and the labyrinthine industrial-vault interiors produced one of the most distinctive visual registers of 1990s European fantasy. Angelo Badalamenti's score, the second of his major French-cinema commissions after Twin Peaks, anchors the film's tone. The film influenced Guillermo del Toro, Tim Burton, and the broader steampunk-cinematic register.