Born in 1950, Alain Ughetto has made several animated shorts, including The ball (awarded a César in 1985), and a feature film, Jasmine (2013), which told his love story with an Iranian woman, in Tehran, at the end of the 1970s. He is now returning to the cinema with Forbidden to dogs and Italians, in which he traces the history of his Italian grandparents, who left Piedmont at the beginning of the 20the century to settle in France. After nine years of work, this film shot in stop motion (image by image) arrives in theaters, crowned with two prizes: that of the jury of the Annecy Festival and that of the best animated film of the European Film Awards.
From what moment did you wonder about the history of your grandparents?
From my youth, I captured snippets of a story that everyone was trying to erase. I didn’t know my grandfather Luigi but I knew my grandmother Cesira until I was 12 years old. However, she had worked so hard to become more French than the French, that she never told me anything about her Italian past. Now, my name is Ughetto. An anecdote, in this regard: I was 11 when a friend told me one day “go see the cinema, there is a film about you”. The movie was called The Time of the Ghetto [de Frédéric Rossif (1961)]. I couldn’t see it, because it was forbidden for under 16s, but I wondered why they had made such a mistake on my name. That is to say how much this question bothered me! Then, during my studies, I always chose optional subjects relating to Italian cinema. The choice was unconscious. When I understood it, I wanted to dig into this story and, ten years ago, I undertook research, questioned cousins, cousins to retrace the path of my grandparents.
What was the trigger that led you to make a film of their story?
When I read The World of the Vanquishedby sociologist Nuto Revelli [ouvrage sur la vie des paysans du Piémont, de la fin du XIXe siècle à nos jours, paru aux éditions La Découverte, 1980]. The author brought back the words of peasants who recounted the misery, the wars, with their own words. I heard my grandfather’s voice there. It was a gift. In my head, it became a movie.
In your film, you also stage its manufacture and involve your own hand. Was this bias imposed from the start?
Yes. I first chose to tell the story of my grandfather through my grandmother and the fictional dialogue that I establish, in the film, between her and me. And immediately afterwards, I asked myself how I was going to fit into the story. It then occurred to me that this story, which remained silent, was in fact transmitted from hand to hand. My grandfather made his tools himself, he always worked with his hands. My father had a passion for DIY, he built his own house. And me, I’m a craftsman, I make stop-motion animation that always starts with tinkering with materials. I wanted to tell this knowledge transmitted.
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