L’Oydssée de Pi
(Life of Pi)

In the middle of the ocean, the wreck of a cargo ship leaves a teenage boy stranded in a lifeboat with a tiger — a situation seemingly impossible to film, unless one pushes it over into a realm of purely synthetic poetry. A decade after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee once again redefines realism by inventing a new body, both experimental and artificial : the animal, rendered as a digital actor whose performance is no longer captured by cameras but created elsewhere. Yet Life of Pi is more than a technical feat questioning the very nature of cinema; it is also a celebration of human ingenuity — in its most artisanal and imaginative dimensions — brilliantly intertwined with the unfathomable and hypnotic enigma of the animal gaze. Aisha Rahim