From Placed to La Vraie famille, films about homes, foster families and children who have been taken away from their parents are the current cinematic news in France. Chance of the calendar or common desire to tell this reality to extract it from the clichés that stick to its skin? Be that as it may, it’s a challenge that Frédéric Baillif and his Mif take up hands down. In the beginning, there is the chaos and the intensity of the homes that the director, a self-taught Genevan, knows well, since he was himself an educator. Then, there are these young Swiss people to whom he proposed this adventure. If he turned to a mixed home where he knew the director – whom he incidentally recruited for his film – only the girls agreed to board his mission. The boys, for their part, did not join the project. Kassia Da Costa, the interpreter of the volcanic Novinha, saw it as a personal challenge: “When I met Frédéric, I was in a phase of my life where you couldn’t count on me. I changed my mind very quickly. But I decided to give myself this opportunity to try to bring a project to fruition. And it was a challenge to get to the end.”Anaïs Uldry, who plays Audrey, a mysterious and disturbing 16-year-old girl, wanted to seize the opportunity to show the truth of the homes. “I too, when my father threatened to send me to a foster home, I was not at all aware of what the young people were going through there.” It is her character who, surprised in bed with a 14-year-old boy who is therefore not of sexual majority, will set fire to the powder and break the very precarious balance of this “mif” that no one has chosen. . From the outset, we understand that we will not be spared by the film and that good feelings, there will be no question. If all these teenagers are victims, they have also sometimes committed the irreparable or are here of their own volition. Built up in chapters, La Mif paints portraits of the individuals who make up this often imposed community, and thanks to a game of flashbacks and flashforwards, the stories respond to each other to open different doors that come to nuance them. wishes to speak more instead of but tries to give voice to the first concerned, by offering roles to non-professional actors whose story resonates with the narrative of the film. If La Mif is not a documentary, the stories of Audrey, Alison, Novinha, Précieuse, Justine, Caroline and the others were written and produced with their future interpreters, who were inspired by their experiences and what they have were the privileged witnesses to compose their score. Sarah Gavron gives us the recipe for Rocks, a collective and instinctive film For two years, apprentice actresses and director discussed and then learned to improvise to give substance to these dented trajectories. Anaïs explains: “With Frédéric, we talked a lot about the reasons why we were placed in a home, so that they understand our personalities, that he assigns us the role in which we would be most comfortable. Our stories, we built together, but we were able to modify them during filming according to our reactions.” With La Mif, the border between reality and fiction has rarely been so thin, and for an hour and fifty minutes, the film is played of this uncertainty. But coming from the documentary, Frédéric Baillif this time preferred to take the side of modesty by passing these destinies through the sieve of fiction, thus arousing the support of these young women who would not have liked to see their real stories in the ‘screen. “The goal was not to tell my real story. If Frédéric had come to see us with a documentary project, I’m not sure I would have accepted because our life can be a strength but also a weakness” , admits Anaïs. Alternately intense then vulnerable, all these budding actresses are admirable and sign a double performance: that of the game, of course, but above all that of having managed to tell their rugged life course while still having a foot in it. And three years later, Kassia, who lamented that she never carried out her projects, is in front of us to ensure the promotion of the film. For the rest, they have very concrete projects. Like her character in the film, Kassia hopes to earn a cooking degree before trying her luck in film. Audrey, she finished an art school before leaving to improve her English in order to integrate theater training in an English-speaking country. Whatever the “mif” they have chosen, these young women now seem armed for the rest of their adventures.
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