Frida Kahlo and Bartolì in "Josep" animated movie by Aurel
25 August 2021
“Josep”, Aurel's 2020 film inspired by the life and works of Josep Bartolì will arrive in Italian cinemas on 30, 31 August and 1 September in the original version with Italian subtitles.
The film is the account of the adventurous life of Josep Bartolì, a Catalan illustrator who after the civil war in Spain fled to France in 1939 to escape Franco's dictatorship. Along with many other refugee Spanish Republicans, however, he was sent to concentration camps. Witness of that terrible period is the French Serge, a guard of the camp not yet addicted to horror, who many years later will tell the story of his relationship with Bartolì to his young nephew Valentin, who will be fascinated by it.
It is signed by Aurel, pseudonym of Aurélien Froment, French cartoonist among others for Le Monde. With Josep he directed a film for the first time, managing to convey not only the admiration for Bartolì's life and art, but the love for the artistic trait in all its richness and dynamism.
His is a film about memory and the founding power of encounters capable of altering the course of a life. Bartolì went through the twentieth century, having been born in Barcelona in 1910 and died in New York in 1995, escaping war and atrocities to then find himself in Mexico with Frida Kahlo!
«Do you have something to light up?» asks Frida Kahlo to Josep in a dream in the French refugee camp where he was interned. She really did this in post-war Mexico where Bartolì worked before flying to New York.
The film won several awards and was selected at Cannes Film Festival 2020.
