The Miracle Basket

Artist and storyteller Abner Preis tells apparently simple stories with a deeper layer of social meaning. He combines the age-old structures of fairy tales and legends to address current affairs and doesn’t shy away from including an old-fashioned moral with the story, always with a dose of humor. Simple drawings generally play a key role in his art in the form of storytelling.

In The Miracle Basket, these brightly colored drawings have become three-dimensional, so it is as if you were walking through a pop-up book brought to life. A grandfather tells his grandson about a carefree past in which people lived in harmony with nature, until the arrival of a spaceship laden with consumer goods put an end to it. Natural resources were readily exchanged for pizzas and telephones, turning the jungle paradise into an apocalyptic wasteland. Though the parable clearly makes reference to extractive capitalism, neocolonialism and climate change, Preis manages to give his fairy tale a happy ending.

Co-presented by IDFA DocLab and Cinekid.