A tale of broken hearts and body parts

Jérémy Clapin’s I Lost My Body is a story of someone trying to make themselves whole again, only that this someone is a severed hand that’s looking for the rest of its body. Adapted from the book, Happy Hand, by Guillaume Laurant, the 81-minute French animated drama explores the themes of longing and loss while following the life of The Hand, much like Thing from The Addams Family, which comes to life in a Parisian medical lab, breaks free from captivity, and crawls to the world outside, hoping to find its owner. Flashback reveals The Hand’s life when it was whole. It belonged to Naoufel, a pizza-delivery boy, who falls in love with the voice of Gabrielle, an unhappy customer, on a tower-block intercom. I Lost My Body, which became the first animated film to take the top prize in the Critics’ Week section at Cannes this year, is a strange journey of who we become when we are not fully ourselves.