2017 SLIFF Award-Winning Films

St. Louis Film Critics’ Joe Williams Award for Best Documentary Feature

(Bruno Romy, 2016, France, 69 min.)

One April morning in 2012, the director Bruno Romy and the artist Annabelle Cocollos are told that Mika, their 6-year-old daughter, has leukemia. Eight months later, when Mika is finally able to return to school, the family decides to make a documentary called “When I Was 6, I Killed a Dragon.” Surprisingly fun and full of life, even as it deals with illness and the fear of death, the film blends fantasy and slapstick into its lively mix and incorporates touching, playful, and sometimes fantastical footage. A surreal pageant that includes animated sequences made from drawings by Mika and Annabelle, the film is by turns sad and funny, emotionally frank and wildly imaginative — a work filled with humor and music. Romy’s fiction films draw inspiration from the work of Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Tati, and Buster Keaton, and this documentary — despite its seemingly grim subject — is buoyed by the same comic spirit. The film is in French with English subtitles.