Screening :

René Laloux, Roland Topor,
The Snails, 1966

The Snails (1966), directed by René Laloux in collaboration with Roland Topor, is an animated short film structured as a dark allegorical fable. It follows a farmer in an unnamed, fictional country who attempts to cultivate life in an environment devastated by drought, only to have his efforts repeatedly disrupted by escalating and increasingly absurd forms of adversity. The narrative develops as a chain of transformations in which each solution generates a new problem, producing a cyclical structure rather than a linear resolution. The visual language, characteristic of Topor’s graphic universe, combines grotesque forms, surreal creatures, and minimalist landscapes to construct a world where ecological fragility and instability are constant conditions.