No Dogs or Italians Allowed

Alain Ughetto's No Dogs or Italians Allowed (Interdit aux chiens et aux Italiens) won the Annecy Jury Award and the César for Best Animated Film. The film consolidated Ughetto, a French-Italian stop-motion animator and director, as one of the most distinctive contemporary figures in independent European animation. The film took approximately five years to make.

Ughetto retraces his grandparents' lives, from a starving Piedmontese village at the turn of the twentieth century, through decades of exile, war, factory work in France, and the broader migrant-labour history of the European-Alpine regions across the first half of the twentieth century. The film is constructed entirely with stop-motion puppets on tabletop sets, with Ughetto himself appearing in live-action interludes (sitting at a table, asking the puppet-grandmother questions about her life, in a meta-textual narration the film foregrounds throughout.

The structural conceit) the granddaughter's questions, the grandmother's puppet-performed responses, the family-history reconstruction across multiple generations, produced one of the most distinctive recent works of European animation. Ariane Ascaride, in voice-over, performs the grandmother's voice. The film operates simultaneously as autobiographical-genealogical document, historical study of the broader Italian-French migrant labour tradition, and structural-experimental-animation exercise. The Annecy Jury Award and the subsequent César win confirmed the film's standing in the independent-animation world.