My Life as a Zucchini (2016)

My Life as a Zucchini arrives from Switzerland with stop-motion puppets, a title that sounds like a side dish, and a body count. A boy accidentally kills his alcoholic mother by closing an attic door on her, and the film then deposits him in a state orphanage filled with children whose parents are dead, imprisoned, or worse. This is grim material, and it is handled with a restraint that has become unusual. Nobody stands up to deliver a thesis. The camera simply watches.

The orphanage ensemble is visually varied, though the variety comes from the setting itself. Put twelve children in a room and you will get twelve faces. There is no casting program at work here, no checklist being serviced. Camille, the new arrival, is a tough and resourceful girl who outmaneuvers a grasping aunt, but the film treats that as character, not commentary. The aunt wants custody for the money she will collect, which registers as a small, sour note about greed. It is a plot device. It is not an argument about the economics of care, and it never pretends to be one. The customary apparatus of social instruction is simply absent from the proceedings.

The film builds its feeling honestly, through the slow accretion of small objects. A beer can refashioned into a toy boat. A kite bearing a drawing of a father as a superhero. A group photograph carried away from the place that made it. It never lectures, and it never asks for our approval. What remains is a modest, well-made picture about damaged children finding each other, and that is sufficient. The classification is straightforward. The file can be closed.