Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef’s award-winning stop-motion animated film set in Belgium-occupied Congo screening alongside their short film ‘Oh Willy...’ and Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s ‘The Burden.’
GKIDS has released a new clip from directorial duo Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef’s This Magnificent Cake!, which is now playing at the Laemmle Theater in Glendale, CA.
An official selection at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Toronto International Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, and Animation Is Film Festival, This Magnificent Cake! received an Annie Award nomination for Best Independent Animated Feature, the Andre-Martin Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, and the top feature animation prize at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
The award-winning stop-motion animated This Magnificent Cake!, produced by Belgium’s Beast Animation, is a mid-length feature set in the late 19th century in the bitter milieu of Belgium-occupied Congo. Keen to compete with other European imperial powers on the continent at the time, then-King Leopold II of Belgium proclaimed, “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.”
The subsequent occupation of the Congo would come to attract a contingent of servants, merchants and miscellaneous bourgeois driven by everything from insatiable greed to existential fear. From the intimate stories of these characters -- many of whom pass through a luxury hotel in the middle of the jungle -- emerges a greater narrative concerning the imperialist mentality. In a film by turns surreal, darkly comic and brutal, directors Roels and de Swaef ultimately turn their critical gaze on the colonists themselves in a work of stunning, mysterious beauty.
Watch the new clip, “The King,” in the player below:
Now playing in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Glendale (207 N Maryland Ave, Glendale, CA 91206), This Magnificent Cake! is accompanied by Swedish director Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s stop-motion short The Burden (2017) and Roels and de Swaef’s first short film, Oh Willy... (2012). Find tickets and showtimes here.
-- Only on ANIMATIONWorld:
Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef Return with ‘This Magnificent Cake’ --
Source: GKIDS
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
