‘The film shows the whole spectrum of humanity, the best of humanity and the worst of humanity,” said Michel Hazanavicius, a French-Jewish director who is one of the world’s most acclaimed filmmakers, speaking in a recent interview about his latest film, The Most Precious of Cargoes, which just opened in theaters around Israel. He visited Israel recently as the guest of honor at this year’s recently concluded Haifa International Film Festival.
Hazanavicius first became famous around the world for his unique, modern-day silent film, The Artist, which won five Oscars in 2012, including Best Picture and Best Director – and which made international stars out of its actors, Jean Dujardin and his co-star Berenice Bejo, who is now his wife.
The director has had an eclectic career, making the OSS 117 spy spoof movies with Dujardin, but also such films as Godard Mon Amour, a dramatized version of the life of legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.
Hazanavicius has switched gears with his latest film, The Most Precious of Cargoes, which had its international premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Cargoes, an animated dramatic film, is both his first animated movie and his first time making a movie about the Holocaust.
Based on a novel by Jean-Claude Grumberg, Cargoes is constructed like a fable and tells the story of a young Jewish man on a train on his way to Auschwitz who manages to throw one of his baby daughters, wrapped in a tallit, out of the window. She lands in the soft snow and is found by a peasant woman.
This woman has lost her own child and has been praying for another one. Knowing full well that the baby may be Jewish, she nevertheless takes on the role of her mother and convinces her far more reluctant husband, a woodcutter, to allow her to raise this little girl.
The woodcutter, still repressing his sadness at the death of his own child, at first doesn’t want anything to do with the baby, aware of her origins. However, when he touches her he gets a shock: He can feel her heart beating. He had always been told that Jews were the people with no hearts, which is what they are referred to throughout the movie.
“When he discovers her humanity, he really discovers his own humanity. The metaphor of a people who are heartless is in the book, it’s not my creation and I think it’s very powerful. Because all these people who hate, they want to dehumanize people,” he noted – a phenomenon that he has noticed recently with the resurgence of antisemitism in France, but more on that later.
The character of the woodcutter then devotes his life to saving the child from the townspeople, who want to kill any Jew in their midst. The woodcutter’s wife, left alone, is also helped by a wounded World War I veteran, who gives the baby milk and cheese from his goat. His wife finds her faith in God tested as she realizes that it was the baby’s father, her devotion, and her husband’s bravery who keep the child alive.
Hazanavicius was drawn to the novel, whose author is a friend of his parents, and to the fable-like, animated approach, for several reasons.
Born in 1967, the director felt until recently that Holocaust stories weren’t his to tell/ Nevertheless, his family has Lithuanian and Polish roots and came to France in the 1920s, managing to survive the Holocaust there.
He felt it was time to tell this story, he said, “Maybe because I’m getting older, maybe because I never did that work with my children, to explain to them what happened to our family, to the Jewish people and everything.” His children are in their teens and 20s.
“Maybe we feel that story of the representation of the camps [in fiction and on film] is changing. Till 10 years ago, survivors could speak, but now that they’re dying, we had to find another way to tell that story… I was still doubting whether I could do it, but my wife, Berenice [Bejo], said, ‘You have to make it. Not only for our kids, but for all kids you have to do it,’ she pushed me.”
The idea of presenting the Holocaust as a fable spoke to him.
“All the characters are archetypes, and everyone can be connected to it because it’s a universal story.” He is pleased that audiences around the world have connected to the story, especially young people of different religions in France. “For them, it was their story. Their grandparents came from another country, and that’s the power of fable. Nobody is outside of the story. It speaks about humanity.”
Using animation also helped the film speak to today’s audiences, he felt. “Since it’s animation, it allows you to have a certain distance. When you see an actor [in a Holocaust film], you know there are actors, you know there’s some coffee, there’s a crew, you know it’s a lie. It can be an ethical problem, to watch people pretending they are deported and they are going to die. But when it’s animation, the drawings do not lie. They do not have another life. Animation allows you some distance, because it triggers our imagination, and we are more involved. So I don’t have to show that much and even though there are no explicit images [of the death camps], the audience experiences it more intensely. It’s a paradox, but it’s even more realistic.”
There is a stunning sequence about three-quarters of the way through, showing the baby’s father at a death camp. Most of it simply shows him surrounded by faces of the dead, their eyes closed. It’s haunting.
“I could have done a shorter sequence that would have been easier to watch, but I wanted it to be uncomfortable,” Hazanavicius said. “I wanted it be difficult… It wouldn’t be right to try to recreate Auschwitz in a comfortable sequence.”
SPEAKING OF making people uncomfortable, the playful and witty director, who speaks English fluently but hesitates on certain words, spoke about why, for the first time in his career, he was moved to write an op-ed for the newspaper Le Monde in 2024, decrying the rise in antisemitism since Hamas attacked Israel and started the war. “How Could I Have Become So Evil In Such A Short Time?” he asked in the headline.
Director’s background
Hazanavicius, a secular Jew, wrote that recently, he had felt that he was seen as especially Jewish in France. “Why, for some time, do I, who am Jewish among other things, who has never really given a damn, have the impression of being more and more obliged to be Jewish. To react as a Jew, to think as a Jew, basically to be Jewish above all?”
“Why,” he asked, “when we put Netanyahu on trial, do I too often hear the trial of Israel, or even the trial of the Jews, instead of simply putting the extreme Right on trial? Why do I feel like, for a while now, Jews are the coolest enemies to hate?”
Answering some of the questions he raised in his article, he said that he felt recently that the far Left in France, and now even many of those in the center, had been “playing with fire, and pouring oil onto it,” by embracing antisemitism.
“For me, the only explanation to use that word ‘genocide’ [about this war] is to create an equivalence between what Jewish people have been through in WWII and what happens now. And for them, it’s a way to say, ‘You see, the victims are now the killers and it’s all the same so now, we are done with that story.’ Which is incredible.”
His op-ed is brilliantly written and persuasive, but writing about politics is so far out of his comfort zone that I sensed he was wary of speaking about it. “You know it’s a complex topic, it’s not possible to have one explanation for everything,” he said.
But he was passionate and clear when I asked whether he thought there was a future for Jewish filmmakers in France. “Yes!” he said. “There are many Jewish filmmakers who keep working,” and he emphasized that he had paid no professional price for his opinion piece.
Asked what advice he would give to young filmmakers, he said, “It’s hard to give advice, everyone has to follow their own path. I would only say: ‘My advice is to be lucky. But the thing is, when luck knocks at your door, it has to find you working.’ That’s the only advice that I have.”
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