February 1939, the French border, and a tide of people fleeing the collapse of the Spanish Republic. That is where Josep begins. Directed by Aurel, this 71-minute animated biography from Belgium, Spain and France tells the story of Josep Bartoli, a Catalan artist who kept sketching inside the camps that were supposed to erase men like him.
What is Josep about?
The French government, unprepared for hundreds of thousands of Spanish Republicans crossing the Pyrenees, answers with internment. The refugees are herded into camps where they must build their own shelters, eat the horses that carried them over the mountains, and bury their dead as hunger, cold and disease do their work. Inside one of these enclosures, a friendship forms across the barbed wire. On one side stands a French guard; on the other, Josep Bartoli, a Barcelona-born cartoonist whose weapon against Franco has always been his pencil. The film follows how these two men come to see each other, and how Bartoli's drawings, made in secret, become both testimony and a reason to stay alive. The story is framed as memory, carried from the camps to the artist's later life, which ended in New York in 1995.
About the cast
Sergi López voices the central figure, with a cast drawn from both sides of the Franco-Spanish border: Alba Pujol, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Valérie Lemercier, Gérard Hernandez, David Marsais, Bruno Solo and Thomas Vandenberghe. Because the film is animated, the performances live entirely in the voice work, and the mix of Catalan, Spanish and French accents reinforces the border setting. With no faces to carry emotion in the conventional sense, the ensemble's restraint matters: the guard and the prisoner are built from pauses and tone as much as from dialogue.
Context & significance
Animation is an unusual choice for a biography, and here it is the point rather than a gimmick. Bartoli was a cartoonist, so telling his story through drawn images puts the audience inside his own medium: the film asks what it means to record atrocity with a pencil when photographs are impossible and witnesses are dying. That framing lets Aurel move between the harsh physical reality of the camps and the interior world of a man who kept working under guard. The subject matter also fills a gap in European memory. The French internment of Spanish Republicans in 1939 is far less known than the war that preceded it, and the film treats the episode as a story about refugees and borders that still echoes today. For audiences from the Iranian diaspora, the themes of exile, of making art under pressure, and of the long road from one country to another will feel close to home even though the setting is Catalonia and southern France eight decades ago.
Watching Josep on Ktime
Josep is available on K-Time in its original language without a Persian dub or Persian subtitles, so it suits viewers comfortable with the original soundtrack. Watching requires a K-Time account login; this page is free to read. The Farsi interface makes finding and queuing the film easy for Persian-speaking households.