Flight of the Red Balloon facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Flight of the Red Balloon |
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©BAC Films 2007
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| Directed by | Hou Hsiao-hsien |
| Produced by | Kristina Larsen François Margolin |
| Written by | Hou Hsiao-hsien François Margolin |
| Starring | Juliette Binoche Hippolyte Girardot |
| Cinematography | Pin Bing Lee |
| Editing by | Jean-Christophe Hym Ching-Song Liao |
| Release date(s) | May 17, 2007 (Cannes Film Festival) January 30, 2008 (France) |
| Running time | 115 minutes |
| Country | France Taiwan |
| Language | French |
Flight of the Red Balloon (French: Le voyage du ballon rouge) is a 2007 French-Taiwanese film directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. It is the first part in a new series of films produced by Musée d'Orsay, and tells the story of a French family as seen through the eyes of a Chinese student. The film was shot in August and September 2006 on location in Paris. This is Hou's first non-Asian film. It references the classic 1956 French short The Red Balloon directed by Albert Lamorisse.
The film opened the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2007.
Plot
Suzanne, a puppeteer, lives with her young son Simon in an apartment in Paris. While Suzanne is busy with producing her new Chinese puppet play based on an ancient Chinese text (求妻煮海人), she hires a Chinese film student, Song, as Simon's new nanny. For her college project — a homage to Albert Lamorisse's famous 1956 film The Red Balloon — Song starts to film Simon. She develops a good relationship with mother and son, and translates for Suzanne's masterclass with a Chinese puppet master.
While Simon's older sister Louise is about to graduate from a high school in Brussels, Suzanne plans for Louise to apply for colleges in Paris. For that, she tries to evict her downstairs tenant Marc, who has repeatedly failed to pay his rent, while arguing on the phone with Pierre, Simon's father, who has gone off to Canada for two years to write a novel and who is rarely in touch. Simon visits the Musée d'Orsay on a school trip, where his class is shown The Ball, a painting by Félix Vallotton in which a child chases a red ball.
Cast
- Juliette Binoche as Suzanne
- Simon Iteanu as Simon
- Hippolyte Girardot as Marc
- Fang Song as Song
- Louise Margolin as Louise
- Anna Sigalevitch as Anna
- Charles-Edouard Renault as Lorenzo
- Li Chuan-Zan (李傳燦, son of Li Tian-Lu) as the puppet master
See also
In Spanish: El vuelo del globo rojo para niños
