“My father would’ve loved me to swim competitively. I was in a club when I was young, but I always set off a little bit late in races – and so I had no chance of winning.” French animation director Florence Miailhe chuckles about her swimming career being over before it began. Happily, the same isn’t true of film-making. At 70, she may have left it late for her first Oscar nomination, in the animated short category; but the work in question – the passionate and richly textured Papillon (Butterfly), about world-record-holding French-Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache – gives her every chance of taking the prize.
Miailhe isn’t sure why Nakache – whom her parents met while they were in the resistance – came to mind again in the mid-2010s. “Frankly, I don’t know why my memory was working like that. Maybe because I was thinking of my father,” Miailhe says. Memory is what runs through Papillon, which is swept away on surging tides of reminiscences as Nakache bathes for the final time at Cerbère on the Spanish border (where he died of a heart attack in 1983).
He ploughs through the waves and downwards, stirring up the sediment of the years: growing up in Algeria, he overcomes his early fear of water, meets his wife, Paule as he rises up competitive swimming’s ranks, takes part in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and is stripped of citizenship in Vichy France before being sent ultimately to Auschwitz. Hand-animated by Miailhe on sheets of glass directly under the camera, each frame superimposing the last, it’s an almost physical baptism in oils, pastels and sand, diving headlong into trauma and renewal.
Raised in Toulouse, where Nakache settled during the second world war, Miailhe actually had swimming lessons with his brother, William, on holiday on the Mediterranean coast. The champion’s ostracism has sad contemporary echoes for the director, who is also Jewish. “For a while now in France, this idea that we can deprive a group of their nationality, because of them belonging to another community or religion, has come back,” she says on a Zoom call from New York, where she is promoting Papillon to Oscar voters ahead of the ceremony on 15 March. With scraped-back black hair and bold red spectacles, the oval-featured Miailhe is pleasingly synced with the two-tone decor at the Sanctuary hotel on 47th Street.
Sport is in her eyes a heightened arena for highlighting such issues: “Irrespective of whether he was Jewish or not, what interested me was how even being a champion isn’t enough to prevent that discrimination.” A consensual silence existed around Nakache in the postwar period when he returned without his wife and daughter from the concentration camp; not least imposed by the athlete himself, who like so many others did not want to speak about his experiences. By the 21st century, he was largely forgotten, apart from a handful of pools bearing his name. But the recent success of Leon Marchand, trained like Nakache by the Dauphins du Toec club, has rekindled interest in the history of Toulousain swimming, says Miailhe.
Behind a humanistic story that is natural Oscars territory is Miailhe’s formidable technique. After initially following her mother, the painter Mireille Glodek-Miailhe, into the static visual arts, she was encouraged by the experimental animator Robert Lapoujade to explore the possibilities of motion. With almost no French animation schools in the 1980s, he encouraged her to chuck herself in – which she literally did with the 1991 short Hammam, which wafts Picasso-esque abstraction out of bathhouse vapours.
Water seems to be her element, and she has observed it closely to get the array of effects visible in Papillon: “It’s not a scientific study, but something more sensual and sensitive. What interests me is representing how it’s never the same and always in metamorphosis.” So, for example, she animates an extra layer of oil above the eddies and swells she paints to give a three-dimensional impression of refraction or distortion, or works real soap bubbles into her paint textures to give extra froth and churn to the waters.
Her work is all about embracing happy accidents – even if, effectively painting live in one frame that evolves in front of the camera, it exposes her to bigger errors that could ruin entire sequences. Miailhe relishes the risky and – in the age of encroaching AI – very personal nature of her work. “It’s very difficult and stressful,” she says. “But I like the challenge aspect.”
Papillon – which shares a producer with the 2024’s Oscar-winning animation Flow – was more of a high-wire act in that regard than her lone feature, 2021’s refugee fairytale La Traversée (The Crossing); there, the backdrops were kept entirely separate from the foreground figures. For the latter, she had an international team working in four locations producing the 57,600 drawings needed, as opposed to just four women for Papillon. But relying on others brings its own problems, like being uncertain about her collaborators’ capacity to dig into the paint and rescue sequences that are going awry: “I know how exacting I can be with myself and whether I can judge if something’s going well or not, or when to start again.”
Miailhe won’t leave room for accidents – happy or otherwise – if she bags the Oscar. The nomination has come as a shock, but she knows the rough ballpark of her prospective speech: “Why I wanted to do it originally and to what point it speaks to today.” She is well aware of the country in which she will be speaking, as well as the parallel between Nakache’s fellow swimmers walking away from the pool in protest at his exclusion and current suggestions of boycotting the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. But the real prize glitters more brightly than any statuette. On that she is firm: “It’s important to speak up about human rights and to try to live correctly.”
• This article was amended on 24 February 2026. An earlier version said Léon Marchand was trained by Alfred Nakache at the Dauphins du Toec club; this should have said both swimmers were trained at the club.
