Written and directed by French auteur/filmmaker Sébastien Laudenbach, the 76-minute feature is based on an infrequently adapted Brothers Grimm fairytale and produced by French production company Les Films Sauvages. In hard times, a girl is sold to the devil by her miller father. Protected by her purity from the archfiend, she escapes from the Devil who, in revenge, ends up having her hands cut off. The film uses a distinctively uncompromising and sophisticated graphic style, more common to short films than features, emphasizing line drawing over rendered figures. Facial features are suggested with spare brushstrokes, and figures are often drawn incomplete (though it all makes perfect sense when the drawings are viewed in motion). To get a sense of how unconventional the film’s style is, just take a look at these four consecutive drawings of the main character:
The deal was reportedly negotiated by Eric Beckman, President and CEO, and David Jesteadt, SVP Distribution for GKIDS, and Agathe Valentin, head of international sales for Pyramide International.
“Dave and I were both blown away. The film has an utterly transporting beauty and poetry, while the story unfolds with the powerful dream logic of a fairytale, taking you into the darker, deeper, primal origins and emotional core of the Grimm’s tales,” said GKIDS co-founder Eric Beckman to Variety. “With magic and cruelty, sublime beauty and tenderness, The Girl Without Hands is at once timeless and unlike anything you have seen before, a stunning example of the potential of the medium of animation as a powerful cinematic art form for adult moviegoers.”
GKIDS will release the film in North America at a yet-to-be-announced date. The deal was negotiated with Pyramide International, one of the top art house distributors in France, which acquired world sales rights to the film last month. It’s a unique pick-up for Pyramid, too, marking the first time that they’ve ever sold an animated feature.
The purchase was made following the film's world premiere last week as part of the ACID program in Cannes, a parallel selection of films that is independent of the Cannes Film Festival and aims to support emerging filmmakers and independent works that might be overlooked by the main festival. Laudenbach’s film will next screen in competition at the Annecy International Animation Festival in June this year.
Laudenbach was also the recipient of an Emilie Reynaud Prize in 2015 for Daphne ou la belle plante, which he co-directed with Sylvain Derosne.
Laudenbach, who is making his feature-length debut with this project, has been directing animated shorts since the ’90s, including films like Les yeux du renard; Journal, which won a Clermont-Ferrand Fest Youth Prize in 1998; and the black sand-animated short Vasco, which screened as part of the Cannes Critics' Week in 2010 and is embedded below:
