Josep

Aurel is a political cartoonist for Le Monde and Politis, and Josep is his first film. It carried the Cannes 2020 label in the year the festival did not take place, premiered at Annecy instead, and went on to win the European Film Award for Best Animated Feature and the César in the same category.

Josep Bartolí was a real man — a Catalan illustrator and Republican who crossed into France in the Retirada of February 1939, when close to half a million people fled Franco's victory in a fortnight and were interned in camps on the beaches of Roussillon. The film is framed as an old gendarme telling his grandson about the prisoner he befriended there. Aurel animates it in his own line: unfinished sketches, figures left as contour, sand and wire rendered in a few strokes, with colour arriving only where the story allows it. Sergi López voices Bartolí; Sílvia Pérez Cruz sings and voices Frida Kahlo, whom Bartolí knew in Mexico.

The subject is barely taught in French schools and the film was made partly to correct that. What lifts it above worthy history is the argument embedded in its style — that Bartolí drew because it was the only form of testimony available to him, and that a line on paper can hold what a photograph of the same camp cannot. It is short, angry and unusually beautiful.