GKIDS Premieres This Magnificent Cake! (March 1st, LA)
GKIDS will theatrically release the film in LA on March 1st at the Laemmle Glendale (207 N Maryland Ave, Glendale, CA 91206). An official selection at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Toronto International Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, the film received an Annie Award nomination for Best Independent Animated Feature, the Andre-Martin Award at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, and the Best Feature Film at Animafest Zagreb 2018.
This Magnicificent Cake! (CE MAGNIFIQUE GÂTEAU!) is an unforgettable work of stop-motion animation exploring the bitter milieu of Belgium-occupied Congo. 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.
Read the Zippy Frames Film Review
Theatrical screenings of This Magnificent Cake! will be accompanied by the short films "The Burden" (2017) from Swedish director Niki Lindroth von Bahr and "Oh Willy..." (2012), the first short film by Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef (programme running time: 75 min')
GKIDS will theatrically release the film in LA on March 1st at the Laemmle Glendale (207 N Maryland Ave, Glendale, CA 91206).