Zarafa, an award winning feature film, was screened at the festival for the fourth time on Thursday.
Nearly 550 students from Beaconhouse Newlands, Beaconhouse Valencia, Beaconhouse Garden Town, Beaconhouse Johar Town, Roshni Association and Salamat School System watched the movie at Hall 2.
Zarafa is a 78-minute animated film directed by Rémi Bezançon and Jean-Christophe Lie. The movie has earlier been screened at the Annie Awards in USA and César Awards in France. The movie starts with an old man telling the story of Maki (voice over by Max Renaudin), a ten-year-old orphan from Sudan who is captured by a slave trader Moreno along with his friend Soula.
Maki manages to escape and meets a giraffe and her mother and become friends with them. The slave trader Moreno finds Maki and kills the mother giraffe and was about to take Maki back, when Hassan, a Bedouin nomad (voice over by Simon Abkarian) saves him. Maki promises the dying giraffe that he would take care of her calf.
Hassan takes the giraffe with him and Maki tags along. Hassan names the giraffe Zarafa (giraffe in Arabic). Hassan then tries to gift the young giraffe to the King of France, Charles X, to convince him to help his country against the Turks. Together, Maki and Hassan cross the desert in an air-balloon, meet pirates and have adventures on their way from Africa to Paris. At the end of the movie it is revealed that the old man was Maki himself.
“The screenplay is excellent,” said Nasir Ali Mazari, a lecturer at Beaconhouse National University. Marib Abbas, an O-level student, at Beaconhouse Garden Town said, “I’m impressed by the voiceover of Max Renaudin (Maki). It is a great performance.”
Published in The Express Tribune, September 20th, 2013.