“My father would’ve loved me to swim competitively. I was in a club when I was young, but I always set off a little bit late in races – and so I had no chance of winning.” French animation director Florence Miailhe chuckles about her swimming career being over before it began. Happily, the same isn’t true of film-making. At 70, she may have left it late for her first Oscar nomination, in the animated short category; but the work in question – the passionate and richly textured Papillon (Butterfly), about world-record-holding French-Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache – gives her every chance of taking the prize.
Miailhe isn’t sure why Nakache – whom her parents met while they were in the resistance – came to mind again in the mid-2010s. “Frankly, I don’t know why my memory was working like that. Maybe because I was thinking of my father,” Miailhe says. Memory is what runs through Papillon, which is swept away on surging tides of reminiscences as Nakache bathes for the final time at Cerbère on the Spanish border (where he died of a heart attack in 1983).
