Petite Maman

A simple yet audacious idea lies at the heart of Céline Sciamma’s (‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’) dreamlike tale: imagine if, as an eight-year-old girl, you could wander off into the woods one day and meet the eight-year-old version of your troubled mother. This is exactly what happens when young Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) and her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), visit Marion’s childhood home in the wake of Nelly’s grandmother’s death. While exploring, Nelly meets fellow eight-year-old Marion (played by Joséphine Sanz’s identical twin, Gabrielle Sanz)… What follows is a tender, playful exploration of the relationship between mother and daughter as equals, as Nelly seeks to understand the cause of her mother’s melancholy… ‘A moving jewel of a film… Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving. I fell instantly under its spell… There is something eternally strange about the simple fact that your parents were once the same age as you, had the same worries and fears and thoughts as you; and crucially, the same inability to see into the future – the future which is you… What a superb movie.’—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian