Directed by Marc James Roels, Emma De Swaef • Animation • With Gaston Motambo, Jan Decleir, Wilm Willaert • 2018 • 44 minutes
In the late 19th century, keen to compete with other European imperial powers on the continent, 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 Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef ultimately turn their critical gaze on the colonists themselves in a work of stunning, mysterious beauty.
An official selection at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Toronto International Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival, THIS MAGNIFICENT CAKE! (CE MAGNIFIQUE GÂTEAU!) is an unforgettable work of stopmotion animation exploring the bitter milieu of Belgium-occupied Congo.
Up Next in Animation
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Tatsumi
Directed by Eric Khoo • Animation • With Tetsuya Bessho, Yoshihiro Tatsumi • 2011 • 98 minutes
TATSUMI celebrates the life and work of Japanese comics artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi-a manga pioneer who elevated the genre to a new level of creative expression and adult realism. A comics-crazed teenager...
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Turn It Back (Lewis Klahr)
Directed by Lewis Klahr • Animation • 2012 • 3 minutes
A feature-length melodrama compressed into just under three minutes, in which a quintessential '60s blonde discovers who she really desires.
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The Fourth Watch (Jane Geiser)
Directed by Janie Geiser • Documentary • 2000 • 9 minutes
The Fourth Watch was one of Film Comment’s Top Ten Avant-Garde Films of the Decade (2000-2010)
The ancient Greeks divided the night into four sections; the last watch before morning was called the fourth watch. In the hours before dawn, ...
