My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts

La grand-mère de Torill Kove lui racontait souvent des histoires. L'une en particulier tournait autour du repassage des chemises du roi de Norvège. Et si ce détail insolite n'était que la pointe de l'iceberg? Peut-être avait-elle travaillé secrètement dans la résistance norvégienne...? ou avait-elle même pris la tête d'un mouvement de guérilla d'un genre nouveau! Tissant l'intrigue à partir de faits personnels, Torill Kove suit le fil d'une histoire familiale, qu'elle enjolive en chemin avec beaucoup de drôlerie. Elle rend de façon inventive la vie et le travail de sa grand-mère à Oslo, particulièrement pendant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Elle mêle avec brio et imagination les contes qu'elle lui racontait avec les événements historiques et la fantaisie et montre comment un épisode de la vie familiale peut atteindre au mythe.

One summer in mid-'60s Norway, a seven-year-old girl asks her parents if she and her sisters can have a bicycle. Me and My Moulton provides a glimpse of its young protagonist's thoughts as she struggles with her sense that her family is a little out of sync with what she perceives as "normal". Wistfully observing her best friend's family, she compares their text-book domestic perfection to her unconventional household. Her loving yet hopelessly out-of-touch parents prove to be a source of quiet embarrassment and anxiety for the young girl. With its bright palette mirroring the verve and energy of the times, this witty and poignant animation by Torill Kove, creator of the Academy Award®-winning short The Danish Poet, views the creativity and forward-thinking attitudes of the parents through the eyes of their introspective daughter. Me and My Moulton tells the charming story of a young girl whose sensitive nature sometimes makes it difficult for her to be honest with the ones she loves most.

It's early afternoon, May 1, 1955 - and Donald McWilliams finds himself with other British soldiers in Ndyeia Gorge in central Kenya. At their feet a Mau Mau fighter lies dying, mortally wounded by their gunfire. Above them all, the vast skies of the Rift Valley. McWilliams is hardly out of his teens - a child of wartime London, stationed to Kenya for his national service. Raised on the romance of Empire, he'd imagined a great African adventure. But the look in the eyes of that dying rebel sets his life on another course. Over fifty years later McWilliams confronts his past with creative audacity and unflinching self-inquiry in A Time There Was: Stories from the Last Days of Kenya Colony. With historical rigour and visual lyricism, he combines his own photographic record of the times with original animation and archival imagery, crafting a film diary of singular beauty and a thoughtful account of the Mau Mau Rebellion - one of the most contentious episodes in Britain's imperial history. The conflict arose from long simmering resentment among Kikuyu who had lost vast tracts of fertile land to white colonial farmers. The rebels were portrayed as depraved savages intent on attacking the civilizing forces of British settlers, but in fact atrocities were committed by both sides - and Africans died in far greater numbers than Europeans. McWilliams frames his own story with testimony from other participants in the events. Mau Mau veteran Mwaria Njuma, who took the Mau Mau oath to reclaim the native birthright of Kenyans, details the on-the-ground struggle - as a freedom fighter in the forests, and a prisoner in the British detention camps. Activist lawyer Achrroo Kapila, from Kenya's Asian minority, defended hundreds of political dissidents, including future president Jomo Kenyatta. And John Nottingham broke rank with fellow colonial officials to embrace the cause of independence. In the tradition of his mentor Norman McLaren, McWilliams employs a rich palette of filmic devices, finding fresh meaning in the random gestures and expressions of old newsreels and snapshots, and arranging his evocative narration within a soundscape that features Kenyan and Mau Mau songs alongside original compositions by jazzman Kevin Dean. With A Time There Was McWilliams completes a remarkable autobiographical trilogy that includes The Passerby and The Fifth Province, distinguishing himself as one of the great poetic essayists of Canadian cinema.