MY PENGUIN FRIEND, a thoroughly winning family film from 2024, makes the perfect companion piece to yet another penguin pic, 2025’s The Penguin Lessons. Like that disarmer, this is also fact-based and set in South America. The 2025 story takes place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the mid 70s, centering around a teacher who’s adopted a stricken bird and choices about freedom during a dictatorship. This one is set in Brazil, starting—after a brief framing opener—in 2011 and covering until 2016, the events occurring at a Brazilian coastal island, and at a large penguin rookerage in Argentine Patagonia. It’s not fraught with the social-political overlay of the later film, but in its more modest way is even more remarkable.

In a village on the Brazilian island of Ilha Grande, fisherman João Pereira de Souza (Jean Reno, 76) finds a penguin, who has lived thru an oil slick and is also way off course. João and his wife Maria (Adriana Barraza, 68) look after the bird, who a neighboring child dubs Dindim. Eventually Dindim goes back to the sea, and makes his way back to his native habitat, a large community of Magellanic penguins in Patagonia. While there he gets tagged by a research team. Over the next eight years Dindim returned for stays with João on Isla Grande, an astonishing 5,000 mile swim. And you think your road trips are a big deal…

That it actually happened would be amazing enough without dramatic adornment, and thankfully the script and direction don’t treat Dindim as cute pet but as an individual character with his/its own life, one that happens to intersect with the (again, thankfully) kindly humans who become his friends. The warmth of Reno and Barraza, and slivers of characterization from the supporting cast are well measured, emotions are caressed rather than clobbered, and the essential thrust—the natural world imperiled by careless human activity—is brought home in subtle touches rather a bullhorn lecture, which, however vital and crucial those are, haven’t done much to slow, let alone halt, our steamrolling ecocidal insanity.

Directed by David Schurmann (Little Secret), written by Paulina Lagudi Ulrich and Kristen Lazarian, the shoot was accomplished in Brazil and Argentina. Anthony Dod Mantle (28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire) did a beautiful job on the cinematography, and the CGI interplay is exemplary. Made for $9,704,200, this deserved a much better box office response than what it received, just $5,071,000. Time will (or should) bring a greater audience.

“Not my pet. He is my friend.”

With Alexia Moyano, Rocío Hernández, Thalma de Freitas, Duda Galvao. 97 minutes.

* Schurmann: “I had to tell Jean Reno, a cinema legend, ‘Jean, the penguin is more important than you in this film’… he was incredibly respectful and understood….For me, this is a story about how even small acts of empathy towards another being, not necessarily a human, can have lasting effects…I tried to create something that would give people some comfort, a bit of relief and hope in this harsh world.”

Don’t flip(per) out— 80% of penguin footage is of real birds, ten of whom were ‘rescue penguins who ‘played’ Dindim.  CGI created 15%, animatronics 5%.