Savages

Sauvages

From the director of NYICFF 2017’s My Life as a Zucchini, comes yet another deeply moving stop-motion story of a found family. Keria lives on the edge of Borneo’s tropical rainforest with her father, where aggressive deforestation has become the backdrop of their daily life. When an orangutan is killed by loggers, they take him under their care. Then another visitor comes to upend Keria’s life: her Penan cousin, Selaï, who is temporarily leaving behind hunting and gathering for reading and writing. At school she tries to cast him off, embarrassed by his not-so-smooth transition to modern life. But her father reminds her that “family is sacred,” so when he slinks off into the forest, she follows after him. It isn’t long before they’re lost, and Selaï only knows the way back to his indigenous home. Soon Keria learns the ways of her people and reconnects with her relatives. When the loggers threaten her new home, she is determined not to let them destroy it. The forest, her aunt explains, is like their mother—and family is sacred, after all.