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Director Robert Valley teams with Passion Pictures to bring his gritty graphic novel to the screen, garnering an Oscar nod and Annie win along the way.

Duration: 35 minutes
Subtitles: 3 languages + Show
Availability: Worldwide

For the Script 2 Screen book for Pear Cider and Cigarettes, please visit robertvalley.com.

Drink and smoke…that’s what Techno Stypes really likes to do, and fight. He was in no condition to fight. He was sick, really sick. His disease had whittled him down to a shadow of his former self. He was crippled from a car accident when he was 17 but that’s not how he lost his big toe. He lost that in a motorbike accident, yeah he was broken alright… what the hell was he fighting for anyway and what was he still doing in China? His father had given me two clear instructions: 1. Get Techno to stop drinking long enough to receive the liver transplant, and 2. Get him back home to Vancouver. This was not going to be easy.

The 35-minute film, which Valley describes as “a documentary that happens to be animated,” is quite unique. This film, which won an Annie award for best animated special production this past weekend, began life as a graphic novel five years ago as a way for the director to tell a very personal, true story about his efforts to save a self-destructive longtime friend named Techno, who had finally hit rock bottom and called out for help from a military hospital in China.

More about the film here at AWN

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