Mourir Aupres De Toi (To Die by Your Side)
Friday, June 10 - Thursday, June 23, 2011
Spike Jonze’s new short film MOURIR AUPRES DE TOI (To Die by Your Side) is coming straight from the 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week for its US theatrical premiere here at the IFC Center! We’ll be showing the film before most of our regular features as part of our ongoing “Short Attention Span Cinema” program.
A collaboration between Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., Where the Wild Things Are) French designer Olympia Le-Tan and filmmaker Simon Cahn, the whimsical, humorous and poignant MOURIR AUPRES DE TOI was inspired by Ms. Le-Tan’s accessory designs-embroidered felt adaptations of first editions of classic books. “I just loved them and loved the world she was making,” Mr. Jonze explained “So I asked if I could have one. And she said yeah, if you want to make a film for it.”
Set in Paris’s storied Shakespeare and Co. bookstore, the film concerns the adventures of a skeleton (voiced by Jonze) who springs off the cover of “Macbeth” and falls for a damsel from “Dracula.” Filmed in painstaking stop-motion animation, the film required a new stitched felt character for each shot-some 3,000 felt parts in total. “Felt is not the easiest thing to animate,” Mr. Jonze noted. “It’s very flimsy.”