Short Films by Ugo Bienvenu
A diplomat’s son whose early years were divided between Chad, Guatemala, Mexico, and Paris, Ugo Bienvenu, who studied at Gobelins and CalArts, has developed a practice encompassing animation, illustration, music videos, commercial work, and graphic novels. His first animated feature, "Arco"—produced under the auspices of Remembers, the animation studio he founded with Félix de Givry in 2018—premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where it won a host of admirers, before then going on to pick up the top prize at Annecy. As "Arco" gears up for the awards season, Metrograph presents four of Bienvenu’s early works as a director and producer: spanning sci-fi, surrealism, and domestic malaise, they demonstrate his affinity for the unsettling.
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Voyage chromatique
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 4 mins | 2011
With its pack of flexing, thrusting figures, cold and white as if carved of marble, some handless or footless but still animated by amorous intentions, this transfixing, techno-set short evokes the surrealist imagery of Giorgio de Chirico. -
Maman
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu and Kévin Manach | 5 mins | 2013
An unsettling portrait of domestic anomie, in which communication between family members has broken down. What remains is the persistent whistling of a pot, an iron thumped against the wall, and the matriarch’s wordless, raspy scream. -
Dolly.Zero
Directed by Ugo Bienvenu | 4 mins | 2017
A retrofuturist tale of doomed lovers on a loop, illustrated in the spirit of seminal French comics magazine "Métal Hurlant" and set to a propulsively plaintive synth groove.
