Mary & Max

Randomly choosing a name in the telephone book leads to an extraordinary friendship: Mary Daisy Dinkle, a little girl from Australia, writes a letter to Max Jerry Horowitz in New York and asks him to be her friend. The lonely eight-ear-old sends her bizarre yet profound questions to the autistic man in his mid-forties who, in turn, sends her his observations of humans that seem oh so alien to him. For both of them, this tragic-comic friendship becomes the pivotal point of their lonely existence. The dissimilar outcasts not only reveal the differences between generations, they also offer a compassionate portrayal of society viewed from the outside. The film by director Adam Elliot opened the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and was honoured with the award for Best Animated Feature at the International Festival of Animated Film in Stuttgart. It also won the Cristal Award for Best Feature Film in Annecy and the Glass Bear at the Berlinale 2009. (ym)