French criticism granted this Tuesday the 2020 Louis Delluc Award for Best First Work for Josep, in which the illustrator Aurel honors through the cartoonist Josep Bartolí the memory of the Spanish republicans who crossed into France fleeing repression.
The award, created in 1937, is considered the equivalent in the world of French cinema to Goncourt, the most prestigious literary distinction in France, and it rewards both the best French film of the year and the best debut feature.
Despite the partial closure of the galleries in France last year due to the pandemic, the award kept its delivery, although he changed his traditional ceremony in the Parisian restaurant Fouquet’s for a media advertisement.
The award for the best French film of 2020 was attributed to the documentary Teenagers, of Sébastien Lifshitz, which portrays the life and hopes of two young people, Emma and Annaïs, from 13 to 18 years old.
The Louis Delluc Prize takes its man from the eponymous filmmaker and film critic (1890-1924) and its jury, made up of a score of critics and film personalities, is headed by Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival.
Concentration camps for Republican exiles
Directed by cartoonist Aurélien Froment, alias Aurel, from a script by Jean-Louis Milesi, Josep is an animation for adults that is set in 1939, when the French government decides to confine republicans fleeing the Franco dictatorship to concentration camps.
In one of those fields, two men, separated by a barbed wire, make a friendship; one of them is Josep Bartoli, a cartoonist who fights against the Franco regime.
Josep is a Franco-Spanish-Belgian co-production that has already won the award for Best Animated Film at the last European Film Awards. The film was also selected at the last Cannes Film Festival, which was not finally carried out due to the pandemic.
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