Friday 11 October: Director's Talk Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Jeunet became a household name in 2001 thanks to Amélie, a film that filled cinemas in Ghent and has become the longest-running film in recent history at Sphinx Cinema. In all, more than half a million Belgians headed to the cinema to watch Amélie.

Subsequently, Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed another two films, A Very Long Engagement (2004) and Micmacs (2009). For the filming of The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet – based on the bestseller by American author Reif Larsen – he returned to the United States for the first time since he directed Alien: Resurrection in 1997.

A 12-year-old boy with an unusual fascination for cartography and science gets a phone call from the Smithsonian in Washington telling him he’s won the prestigious Baird Award for one of his wacky inventions. T.S. Spivet (Kyle Catlett) immediately packs his bags (including his telescope and four compasses), writes his eccentric parents a letter to say goodbye (his mother is played by Helena Bonham Carter) and jumps onto a goods train on his own to travel from an isolated ranch in Montana to Washington, D.C. It’s not just the boy’s amazing trip that captures the imagination but also the many notes, drawings and maps he makes along the way.