Review of Josep

Josep (2020)
8/10
Art as resistance and testimony
24 January 2021
In 1939, the Spanish refugees persecuted by Franco, once they crossed the Pyrenees, were confined by the French government in concentration camps.

This tough animated film by Aurel narrates the meeting of Serge, a French gendarme, with the Catalan cartoonist and painter Josep Bartoli (in the voice of Sergi López) in a prison camp in Perpignan and the friendship that developed between them.

The film is structured as a flash back based on the story that an elderly Serge tells his grandson. The line of the drawing is sober and corresponds to the dryness of this atypical biopic.

The film's bleak atmosphere and its portrayal of the horrors of the camp are at times overwhelming. His notes on the political universe of the time are also accurate, with a triumphant Franco regime and a spectrum of Spanish refugees where the political differences between them appear, reflect on the limits of obedience, suffer the devastating force of prejudice, emerge the value of piety and solidarity and art stands out as salvation and testimony.

It is in the camp where most of the story takes place, which in no way exhausts the odyssey suffered by Bartoli, who at one point expressed: "if these great ideas do not find a good person, they become death"
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