Savages

Claude Barras' Savages (in French Sauvages) is the Swiss director's second feature, following his Oscar-nominated My Life as a Courgette (2016). Like that earlier film, it is stop-motion animated, made by the small Lausanne-based studio Nadasdy Film together with French and Belgian co-producers, and like Courgette, it took several years of patient model work before reaching screens.

The film premiered as a Special Screening at Cannes 2024 and won the Audience Award at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival the same year, a major prize for stop-motion in particular, which has become an increasingly rare format in mainstream European animation. The screenplay is by Catherine Paillé, Nancy Huston, Morgan Navarro and Barras himself, with French-language voice work; English and other dubs were prepared for international release.

The Penan people of Sarawak (a real Indigenous community whose forest territories have been progressively cleared by palm-oil concessions since the late 1980s) were directly consulted during the production. Bruno Manser, the Swiss activist who lived among the Penan from 1984 onwards and disappeared in 2000, is a touchstone of Swiss public memory; Barras has cited his story as a partial inspiration. The film was one of the most-discussed European animations of 2024 and, alongside Robot Dreams and Flow, contributed to the unusually strong continental presence in animation at the year's awards season.