On this beautiful Saturday, I want to tell you about a movie that I saw on Netflix just two days ago. Why? In short: I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Here’s why.

My Life as a Zucchini (or in it’s original French, Autobiographie d’une Courgette) is a 2002 novel by the lovely author Gilles Paris, a man I had the distinct pleasure of talking to briefly just this morning. Although his book has been translated into twenty different languages, those regrettably do not include English.

The film, however, has.

My Life As A Zucchini was adapted for audiences for the second time in 2016 as a Swiss-French film directed by Claude Barras in a stop-motion style, screening at the Cannes Film Festival and eventually going on to enjoy a tour at the 89th Academy Awards with an entry for the Best Foreign Language Film and Best Animated Feature Film.

I know that sounds good and all but…

Go watch this movie for yourself.

Please.

I’m telling you that it is so heartfelt, and not in all of those warm gooey ways that we usually associate with that word. No, it is grieving, it is warm. There is kindness and there is hatred. Greed and acceptance. There are angry words but it also contains hearts that are open to new loves. New lives.

Zucchini’s story is filled with the lost and lonely children that have “no one left to love them” as the boy, Simon, comes to tell him. Simon is a collector of stories, of the stories of all of the children that come through the orphanage, Fontaine’s. Each of them coming from the very worst situations that life has to offer.

Abuse, addiction, mental illness, deportation, a possible sexual abuse case, and eventually we see the child left behind after a jealousy-induced murder suicide.

These kids are the somber reminders that everything we do, our own issues and struggles, don’t just affect us. Our darknesses leave scars behind on more than just our own bodies and hearts.

Zuchini won’t simply settle for having abuses happen to him anymore though, and neither will his friends. He is capable of making a mark on his situation, even changing it entirely. We see this as he closes the trapdoor on his abusive mother before the title screen even plays out. He dared to say no, to not just take a beating from someone who was supposed to love and care for him.

Granted, he didn’t mean it to knock her down the stairs but in closing that door on her abuse for what we can assume is the first time, he closes the door on that part of his life and the person that he once was. The Zucchini that was forever a victim of others and of his circumstances.

This becomes a sort of theme throughout the short movie where we see the children support and draw strength from one another in times of struggle and to slowly come to find themselves again. They find something else too, something almost as precious.

That there are adults who they can trust, and who want to be trusted.

Adults who can be actually kind, not just putting on a show of it in order to get something out of it.

For a movie, there isn’t as much dialogue as you’d expect but so much is said through the brilliantly expressive characters that the creators have brought to life.

And, oh my Lord and Lady, this scene! The kids are just looking on as a boy has a spill and his mum comes to comfort him. The two realize the unabashed audience they have pretty quickly but Zucchini and his friends don’t care. You become painfully aware while watching it that it’s because they simply aren’t used to seeing a mother comfort a child.

Yeah, no, it’s cool. Totally didn’t need my heart or my soul. Or those tissues wadded in the bin now. You keep those.

So, again, please. Go find this movie on Netflix or elsewhere. Read the book if you know any of the other languages it’s been released in! Give the author, Gilles Paris, some love, enough to send his heart melting.

I know that the tender story that he created certainly melted mine.

With Peace and Passion.

Ta!