Rémi Chayé's Calamity, une enfance de Martha Jane Cannary (2020)

Calamity is a harmless but charming cartoon love story to the Wild West whose director is so careful about the use of language that he even goes out of his way to (on several occasions) avoid this film even getting a PG certificate: a nasty person is referred to as 'bouse' ('dung') rather than 'merde'!

This is the partial, and much imagined rather than researched, tale of Martha Jane Cannery, who is of course more familiarly known as Calamity Jane, probably from the highly sanitised 1953 David Butler film starring Doris Day. It's a kind of coming-of-age story of a convoy of pioneers heading west for Oregon in 1863 by wagon train. The Cannary family without the mother (who's dead) is the last to join, and as a poor family is seen in a poor light.

But when the father falls ill young and rather 'masculine' Martha steps in, and although she is green at first she soon learns how to steer the family out of trouble, and in fact chases after Samson, who appears to have stolen many items from the train, retrieves them, and becomes the train scout for her knowledge and her heroic actions. (Inevitably, there's a shot of Monument Valley, made very famous in John Ford/John Wayne movies.)