My Penguin Friend

My Penguin Friend (2024) comes from a real event, and the real event is less believable than the film. In 2011, on Ilha Grande in Brazil, a retired man named João Pereira de Souza found a Magellanic penguin on the shore, covered in oil and unable to move. He cleaned it, fed it and nursed it back to health. He called it Dindim. When it recovered the penguin left. Then it came back. And came back the next year. It generally arrived in June and left in February, travelling thousands of kilometres in between. Scientists were never able to fully explain it. The film tells this as a family picture and gives João an invented past: a loss and a withdrawal from the world. Jean Reno plays him quietly. On the real side there is a sad footnote: Dindim has not returned in recent years. Biologists suggest he may have aged or joined another colony. The best thing about the film is that the penguin is never domesticated. Dindim is drawn not as a pet but as an animal making his own decisions, which is what made the story extraordinary in the first place. It was shot on the Brazilian coast. It runs 98 minutes. Good for: family films, animal stories, and true events. Comfortable with children. Less good for: there is an oil spill and an injured animal, and the death of a child is described as having happened in the past.