The Ciné-Club, the series of French-language films organized by Cinema Quadrat and Institut Français Mannheim, is showing a poignant animated film about humanity and inhumanity:

THE MOST PRECIOUS OF BELTS - LA PLUS PRÉCIEUSE DES MARCHANDISES

FRA/BEL 2024. D: Michel Hazanavicius. Animated film. 81 min. frzOmdtU. FSK: 12

Poland in the winter of 1943. The wife of a woodcutter finds a baby in the snow near the railroad tracks. In an act of utter desperation, the child has been thrown from a moving train - from a death train on its way to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Despite abject poverty and without thinking about the impending consequences, the childless woman takes the little girl into her care. This child - the most precious of all goods - will bring out the best and worst in people.
With the visual atmosphere of a classic animated film, Michel Hazanavicius combines the bitterness of the Holocaust, war, poverty and death with a fairytale story of humanity and peace in his first animated film.

Introduction: Prof. Dr. Claudia Gronemann, University of Mannheim