In 1976 Melbourne, a lonely 8-year-old girl strikes up a correspondence with an unlikely pen pal: a severely obese 44-year-old New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome.
Come and watch this deeply moving film about loneliness, acceptance and the universal search for connection.
Genre: stop-motion animation, coming-of-age, psychological drama
Language: English, subtitles: Dutch
Length: 1 hr 32 mins
Eight-year-old Mary Dinkle grows up in a suburb of Melbourne, feeling like an outsider wherever she goes. At home, she is largely ignored; at school she is bullied. Out of sheer loneliness, and curiosity, she opens an American phone book one day and randomly picks a name to send a letter to. That letter reaches Max Horovitz: a 44-year-old, Jewish man living in New York, who is obese, autistic, and struggling with the feeling that he doesn’t quite belong anywhere either. What begins as an unlikely exchange of letters slowly grows into a decades-long correspondence, and an extraordinary friendship between two kindred spirits.
The voices of Toni Collette (Mary) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Max) give the clay characters a remarkable emotional depth. Mary and Max opened the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and went on to receive numerous awards. Director Adam Elliot previously won an Oscar for his short film Harvie Krumpet (2003) and was nominated again in 2024 for Memoir of a Snail.
Reviews
“An offbeat and charming animation that is destined to become a cult classic.” Empire Magazine
“Sickly-cute, alarmingly grotesque, and right-on at the same time.” The Guardian
“Only long after the film, and with considerable effort, do you have to remind yourself that what you went all weak-kneed and misty-eyed over was a blob of plasticine -- a superbly directed blob of plasticine.” The Age (Australia)
Ticket information
This film will be shown at Filmhuis De Zwarte Doos.
- Tickets must be purchased online in advance and can be bought by clicking the black “Order” button on this page.
- Cash or card payments are not accepted at the ticket counter.
For more information about tickets, refund policies, and other details, click here.
Please be on time
The screening of the film begin promptly at 19:30 (with no pre-film advertisements), and the cinema hall will open at 19:10. We kindly request that you arrive at the ticket counter at least 10 minutes before the start of the film to ensure a smooth and timely experience for all.
The Studium Generale film program is created in collaboration with the Student Film Committee and Natlab.