Kino Lorber and GKIDS Release
Critically-Acclaimed, Stop-Motion Animation Festival Hit
This Magnificent Cake!
on Blu-ray and DVD September 24
Includes Behind-the-Scenes Gallery, Bonus Short Films, and
an Interview with Director Marc James Roels
Kino Lorber and GKIDS are proud to announce the Blu-ray and DVD release of This Magnificent Cake! (Ce Magnifique Gâteau!), written and directed by Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef. An official selection at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Toronto International Film Festival and Telluride Film Festival, This Magnificent Cake! is an unforgettable work of stop-motion animation exploring the bitter milieu of Belgium-occupied Congo. Acclaimed filmmaker Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) called it “My favorite film of the year.”
This Magnificent Cake! becomes available on Blu-ray and DVD September 24, with a SRP of $34.95 for the Blu-ray and $29.95 for the DVD. Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes gallery, an interview with director Marc James Roels, and two short films: The Burden (2017, directed by Niki Lindroth von Bahr) and Oh Willy… (2012, directed by Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels).
In the late 19th century, keen to compete with other European imperial powers on the continent, King Leopold II of Belgium proclaimed, “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” The subsequent occupation of the Congo would come to attract a contingent of servants, merchants and miscellaneous bourgeois driven by everything from insatiable greed to existential fear.
From the intimate stories of these characters-many of whom pass through a luxury hotel in the middle of the jungle-emerges a greater narrative concerning the imperialist mentality. In a film by turns surreal, darkly comic and brutal, directors Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef ultimately turn their critical gaze on the colonists themselves in a work of stunning, mysterious beauty.