11. Au Hasard Balthazar
I chose Balthazar, because you see the film in a way through the eyes of this donkey. It’s a very… at the end, a very sad story. But it’s more than your Bambi or your Dumbo though; it’s so much more sociological, historical, powerful – an adult film about seeing the culture of that time from the perspective of an animal.
You obviously work with stuffed animals a lot? What is your interest in animals?
In our family, my wife and I, we’re very animal people. We prefer, you could say, animals to people! You can trust animals more that you can trust people. I call stuffed animals "divinities". For children and for others they’re like, some kind of God-ish or protector-ish thing. I happened to find out many years later, only in the 80s, that actually I was born just about five miles from where the teddy bear was invented by a Jewish couple, the Michtoms. It was the same area that my mother came from, in Belarus, and they invented the Teddy Bear in 1902, in honour of Teddy Roosevelt, the president.
