“This film is an urban, modern fairy tale about destiny and resilience; it tells us that to change things, we must surprise ourselves, dare do something unusual, stray away from the straight and narrow. It’s a very loose adaptation of Guillaume Laurant’s novel – the cowriter of Amélie – made in 3D and 2D drawing. I found the concept of the book riveting, i.e. a hand comes to life and is not subject to fate.
My goal is for viewers to forget they are watching an animation film. The film is structured as a puzzle. I chose raw visuals, but sophisticated images that don’t iron out the drawings’ imperfections. On the contrary. I like this rough quality, it keeps us in something organic and away from anything ready-made. Because that’s a risk when you move on from short films to features. It gives room to what is human, to unexpected moments and allows us to play with the camera.
The challenge was finding how to show the hand, its behaviour, its gaze, and inventing a physical vocabulary to convey emotions since it has no eyes or expression. Hence, we gave it a backstory, a childhood. These questions lead me to create complex languages, the one of the hand, which at the beginning escapes from its refrigerator to find its body. And Naoufel’s, the solitary pizza delivery man, to whom the hand belongs. He meets Gabrielle through an intercom 35 storeys away. These two destinies merge into one story.
The story happens mostly at night. I wanted to establish the various languages of the film in the first 20 minutes. The characters are the ones who bring poetry in the brash reality of Paris in the 90’s. J’ai perdu mon corps (I Lost My Body)tells us that we can always get control back of our destiny."
