EXCLUSIVE: Sébastien Laudenbach’s Viva Carmen, an animated retelling of Georges Bizet’s famous opera Carmen, debuts in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight this week and Deadline reveal a first clip.

In Seville in 1945, a pulsating town of sailors and small-time crooks, teenage Salvador, assistant to the gifted knife grinder Antonio, encounters a captivating young gypsy woman, Carmen.

Her stunning beauty and independent spirit set the town abuzz, but Antonio’s mystical ability to glimpse the future in sharpened blades foretells a tragic fate for Carmen at the hands of a soldier, José. With unwavering resolve, Salvador musters an eclectic band of misfit street kids, led by the spirited Belén, to challenge the unyielding threads of destiny and protect Carmen from inevitable doom.

Laudenbach previously made waves with animated features The Girl Without Hands and Chicken for Linda!, which he co-directed with Chiara Malta.

The director recounts how the idea of making an animation of the Bizet’s classic novel came to him through producer Pierre-Henri Léon.

“Passionate about Bizet’s work, he suggested I consider a film that would take as its starting point the children’s chorus that opens the opera with the aria “La Garde Montante” and which, thereafter, plays norole in the narrative,” he recounts.

“The idea of working on a work as powerful as Carmen interested me for more than one reason. Like many people, I was familiar with the work without really knowing it; I had its most famous arias in my head, and I knew the lyrics to some of them. Carmen occupies a very unique place in the history of opera: it is the most frequently performed opera in the world, even though it was a failure at the time of its premiere. It is also one of the most frequently staged and interpreted stories of femicide in art and literature.”

A Folivari film, Viva Carmen is produced by Damien Brunner, Thibaut Ruby and Pierre-Henri Léon. Global Constellation handles sales.