Un Petit Frère

Rose, a fiercely independent single mother, has moved to Paris from the Ivory Coast with her two sons. When a relative tries to hook her up with an acquaintance, the young woman replies that she chooses her own men. Despite the heartbreaks, her dead-end job and her subpar living conditions, Rose is a reservoir of energy and attention for her boys, Jean and Ernest, whom she urges to achieve academic and behavioural excellence. Yet she disappears from their lives at regular intervals. Léonor Serraille’s sophomore feature Un petit frère is an intimately recounted saga of this small family, spread over three decades. With deceptive simplicity, the film’s three chapters relay the narrative from one protagonist to another at different stages of their lives. The result is a composite picture of family life in which the values and choices of one character profoundly shape those of the others. Over the course of the film, Rose, Jean and Ernest come to represent various facets of the immigrant experience in France. Serraille, however, refuses to reduce them to their identities, giving them an emotional and social life that creates room for mystery and complexity. We are given privileged information that the characters themselves don’t have, but the pieces of this puzzle may never fit