Michel Hazanavicius’s sentimental tale about a baby found in the woods features sweet little cartoon birds and rabbits as well as the real horror of Nazi death camps

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius, this postmodern Holocaust fairytale premiered at Cannes last year, and turns out to be a dreamy animated curiosity which is certainly different to the icy realist rigour of other films which have appeared there on the same theme, such as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest or László Nemes’s Son of Saul. It is adapted from a novella by author and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg (who collaborated with Truffaut on The Last Metro), whose own father was murdered in the Nazi death camps.

The late Jean-Louis Trintignant has his final credit as the narrator, introducing us to scenes that could, at first glance, be from the Brothers Grimm. We see a dense central European forest … through which a second world war Nazi train is seen speeding through, carrying terrified Jews to Auschwitz. One man, with a wife, young child and a baby makes a desperate decision to throw his baby out on to the snowy hillside in the hope that someone finds it – and someone does.