Fantastic Planet + Pumzi

In a distant future on the planet Ygam, the Traags, blue, emotionless super aliens, keep humanoids called Oms as pets in a master-slave relationship. The narrator Terr, an Om child that has escaped, starts a revolt with other Oms and together they manage to start a new life on another planet.

La planète sauvage (Fantastic Planet) positions humanity as the slaves, as pets they serve the cruel Traags, a race that considers itself the masters. Smart cooperation and solidarity help the Oms liberate themselves, thereby providing a valuable lesson to the Traags: repression elicits uncontrollable opposition.

Psychedelic score

Director René Laloux and artist/animator/co-scriptwriter Roland Topor adapted Stefan Wul’s SF novel 'Oms en série', a bewildering, surreal parable about humanity’s future. Topor’s cut-out animations depict strange, cosmic landscapes and astounding creatures in a cold universe.

The score features psychedelic jazz (Alain Goraguer) that elevates viewers from their quotidian existences to the supernatural SF experience in which humanity is no longer the measure of all things.

Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, KE 2009, 21’)

Fantastic Planet will be screened along with Pumzi, the very first Kenyan SF film is set in East Africa 35 years after the end of World War III. The earth is dry, the soil is poisoned and there is no water. People live in a high-tech underground city, no one is allowed outside. Nature solely exists in a virtual museum, dreams are suppressed with medication.

A young woman ignores the ban and plants a cutting from a tree in the desert that she feeds with her own bodily fluids, providing it with shade – a sign of hope in a barren world.