Mar 28, 2017

"My Life as a Zucchini" beat 4 live-action films for the top Swiss film awards

The Academy Awards may be over, but the remarkable run of Academy Award nominee My Life As A Zucchini isn't, and the film continues to pick up major honors.

Last Friday, in Geneva, Switzerland, Claude Barras' stop motion film earned the country's top film prize for Best Fiction Film. It's fitting since the film was widely recognized as the best Swiss production made last year and had been selected as Switzerland's entry for the foreign language category of the Academy Awards.

The other nominees in the category, all live-action films, were Aloys, The Divine Order, Un Juif pour l'exemple, and Marija.

It's rare when an animated feature isn't discriminated against because of its technique and allowed to compete against live-action films. It's nearly unheard of when an animated feature actually wins in a film award category that also contains live-action films. The Swiss film community should be commended for recognizing animation for what it truly is - film - and judging it accordingly.

Zucchini also won for best film score at the Swiss Film Awards. Further, a Special Academy Award was presented to Marie-Eve Hildbrand, the casting director of Zucchini, who used an unusually immersive technique to record the voices of the children in the French version of the film. Clips from the voice record sessions can be seen below:

The best animated film was awarded to the short Au revoir Balthazar by Rafael Sommerhalder:

Adding to its winning weekend, Zucchini picked up two awards last Saturday at the Monstra animation festival in Lisbon, Portugal, including the grand prize in the feature film competition. It also won the audience award at the festival. The feature jury at Monstra consisted of Andrea Basilio, Claudia Bolshaw, Olivier Cotte, Pedro Brito, and Zsuzsanna Kreif.

My Life As A Zucchini is currently screening in theaters across the United States. After five weeks, it has has earned $261,881.

Distributor GKIDS is launching the film in new U.S. cities every weekend. This weekend, the film will open in Iowa City, Iowa; Durham, North Carolina; Providence, Rhode Island; Gainesville, Florida; Okemos, Michigan; Port Orchard, Washington; Spokane, Washington; Hartford, Connecticut; and Normal, Illinois. For a complete list of theaters where the film is screening, visit MyLifeAsAZucchini.com.