The Most Precious of Cargoes
Based on Jean-Claude Grumberg’s book of the same name, The Most Precious of Cargoes is a haunting rumination on the power of love over unimaginable evil. As a Holocaust survivor whose father was murdered by the Nazis, Grumberg intended his novel to be a fairy tale merging fact and fiction. Accordingly, Michel Hazanavicius’s animated film does an excellent job of appealing to both children and adults.
An impoverished couple, known simply as Poor Woodcutter (Grégory Gadebois) and Woodcutter’s Wife (Dominique Blanc), toil away in a secluded woodland. As the narrator (a poignant Jean-Louis Trintignant in his final role) reveals, the pair have resigned themselves to never having children. For the Poor Woodcutter, this means one less mouth to feed. But for his wife, this childless existence compounds her isolation. While gathering wood one day, the Woodcutter’s Wife finds a baby wailing in the snow; the Jewish infant was flung from a train bound for a concentration camp. Deeming the little girl a gift from god, the nameless wife raises her as her own. Initially, she is met with callousness from her husband, who denounces the child as being the spawn of a supposedly inferior race – “The Heartless”, as the locals brand the Jewish people. In time, and after feeling the child’s heartbeat, he discovers that the anti-Semitic propaganda he’s been absorbing is in fact false: “The Heartless have a heart.”
What follows is an at once wholesome and harrowing tale. The hand-drawn animation harkens back to 1930s modernist artwork, a stylistic choice that becomes ever more pertinent as the genocide unfolds. Likewise, the use of sound is evocative and markedly naturalistic for an animation. Everything from the sound of breath in the cold air and footsteps in the snow heightens the tension of the narrative.
A tale of hope amid humanity’s most inhuman hour, the film explores the horrors of the past, which in turn hold a mirror to the atrocities of the present. An ever-worsening refugee crisis has shown the extent to which dehumanisation can fundamentally change what we choose to stand for as a society. With the narrator’s stark forewarning that there are people who deem the events of the film to be mere fiction, The Most Precious of Cargoes is a reminder of what we can be when we open our hearts to empathy.
Antonia Georgiou
The Most Precious of Cargoes is released nationwide on 4th April 2025.
Watch the trailer for The Most Precious of Cargoes here:
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