Josep review – inspiring sketch of a fascinating artist

French artist Aurel’s debut film Josep might be described as a graphic novel in motion. It sets out to grapple with a relatively forgotten part of history – namely that concerning the Spaniards who fled from Franco's rule in 1939 and wound up incarcerated in French-run concentration camps. It also doubles as a love letter to the little-known Spanish artist Josep Bartolí, whose work not only captured the despair of this period, but also helped to expose the cruel conditions.

Aurel, perhaps sensing a live-action Bartolí biopic unlikely, has put his own talents to a film that's for the most part set during Josep's time in one of the aforementioned camps, where 50,000 others were also contained. Josep is treated with contempt by the French guards, some of whom are painted literally as cowardly, pig-nosed sadists, but finds solace in his drawings and in small acts of kindness. It's here that Josep also forms a long-standing friendship with one of the guards, who sneaks him the tools to create his art.

Josep takes a bleak setting, but celebrates the strength of the human spirit in the face of terrible odds, avoiding a portrait of pure miserablism. The animation doesn't quite move the way we expect in modern animation, either: characters fade in and out of the frame as a means of showing movement. But there is a real power in these simple images: naked prisoners moving through the morning mist beneath a purple sunrise; a gathering to listen to a woman's hopeful song as she's bathed in yellow light. Bartolí's real drawings are also displayed throughout and appear like visions of the surreal, brilliantly at odds with the film's oppressive backdrop. There’s a little of Hergé in the style of Aurel's drawing, too, which seems typically unsuited to such morbid themes, but whose inherent warmth shines through like a beacon in the darkness.

Josep, voiced here by Sergi Lopez, is cast as an immensely likeable figure, with the kind of life story that now only seems possible for those who lived in the past: moving between battlefields and exotic lands, hobnobbing with other artists and great thinkers – the kind of existence we tend to think of as Hemingway-esque. I'm not sure I needed the framing device, which sees a former camp guard narrating the story of his friendship with Josep to his grandson in the present. And I would have liked to see even more about his time in Mexico and his love affair with Frida Kahlo (briefly touched on here), and his friendship with Jackson Pollock, or his time working in Hollywood where he was later blacklisted.

In what it does show, Josep really only amounts to a sketch of a fascinating life – yet it appears the slightness is intentional, the film uninterested in the idea of the rote biopic, and perhaps most concerned with showing the cruel nature of these camps. Regardless, it's an easy work to admire, made with genuine love and affection for its subject, one that sees an artist reaching through the annals of history and connecting with another in order to create something quietly moving.

Josep is now streaming on MUBI and various digital platforms.