Madame Tutli-Putli, a 17-minute animated film from the National Film Board of Canada, has been selected for screening at International Critics' Week at Cannes.

International Critics' Week runs parallel to the Cannes Film Festival and showcases the work of new filmmakers, usually with first or second films.

Madame Tutli-Putli waits for the train in the animated NFB short by Montreal filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski.
(National Film Board of Canada)

Madame Tutli-Putli is the first professional film for Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, who are based in Montreal.

The selection of their film is "huge for us," Lavis said in an interview with CBC Arts Online.

"We spent four years in a darkened room making it and to be able to premiere it with a trip to the sunny Mediterranean — it's such an honour."

It uses stop-motion animation, combined with puppet animation, to tell the story of the winsome Madame Tutli-Putli, who boards the Night Train, weighed down with all her earthly possessions and the ghosts of her past. On board, she confronts demons both real and imagined.

"We started with this central image of a woman on a train platform in the middle of the night, surrounded by dozens of bags weighing her down," Lavis said.

Original score

They built the story from there, keeping the woman as a sympathetic figure on a psychic journey.

The film has no dialogue, but is accompanied by an original musical score.

Lavis and Szczerbowski, who have run Clyde-Henry Productions for the past 10 years, used computer animation to enhance the background and add special effects.

"One of the things we did was put eyes on the puppets ... to give them an extra amount of soul," Lavis said.

From Cannes, the film goes to the International Animated Film Festival in Annecy, France, and the Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto.

The NFB has been a pioneer in animation and produced this year's Oscar winner for short film, The Danish Poet.

A full lineup for International Critics' Week, which has led in the past to the discovery of filmmakers such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach and Wong Kar Wai, will be released in May.

The program is scheduled for May 17-25.