Friday, September 30, Arte broadcasts at 8:55 p.m. this fiction telling the arrival in a school of a little girl never registered in a school before. She discovers with incomprehension the laws that govern the playground…
What is it about ?
Anya, 10, arrives in the middle of the school year, which will upset the daily life of her CM2 class. After getting a soccer ball in the head, Anya realizes that the geography of the playground is designed to favor boys, with girls being relegated to the sides.
For Anya and her new friends, Nils, Lou and Zoé, this has to stop, by any means possible. And in the midst of the ensuing war, there is Nathan, the director’s son… Between Anya and Nathan, feelings then unknown appear…
La Cour is available from September 23 to December 28, 2022 on Arte.tv and broadcast on Friday September 30, 2022 on the Arte channel, from 8:55 p.m.
Who is it with?
Lucy Loste Berset, 14, plays Anya. Before La cour, the public was able to discover it in Le temps des secrets by Christophe Baratier. Soon, we will see her in Bardot, directed by Danièle and Christopher Thompson. Her parents are played by Lizzie Brocheré (La Belle Époque, Les Rivières Pourpres season 3) and Jérémie Laheurte (You deserve a love, Notre-Dame is burning).
Clotilde Courau plays Laurence, the headmistress of the school, and Silvère Jacot slips into the skin of Nathan, her son and friend of Anya. Finally, Djanis Bouzyani (I will go to the end of my dreams, You deserve a love) lends his features to Vincent, one of the supervisors.
It is the actress, director, screenwriter and producer Hafsia Herzi who directs this TV movie. César winner in 2008 (category of Best young female hope) for her participation in the film La graine et le mule, she saw her feature film Bonne mère crowned with the Overall Prize in the Un Certain Regard selection at the Cannes Film Festival 2021. Victor Jestin and Nacim Mehtar wrote the screenplay.
La cour won the ADAMI Best Director and Young Female Hope award for Lucy Loste Berset at the 2022 La Rochelle Fiction Festival.
Well worth a look ?
For her first production on Arte, Hafsia Herzi signs an important TV movie, touching and overflowing with naturalness. Here, the viewer crosses this playground at the level of schoolchildren, prey to their first emotions and in full discovery of the other. The law of the strongest applies in this place of play and meeting(s), governed by rules whose logic Anya, previously out of school in Australia, does not understand.
In disagreement with the places automatically assigned by some of her hostile comrades, our little heroine clashes with her peers. With her few class friends, she suffers harassment, a societal subject that is increasingly highlighted these days. These wars, generally futile in the eyes of the adult characters, are nevertheless of the order of the vital for the main concerned.
In La cour, girls and boys constantly oppose each other and the theme of space is omnipresent. The footballers are kings and the other minority groups move away. If a member of a band becomes close to a rival, his loyalty is called into question. Anya (one of the “losers“) and Nathan (one of “footy“) experience it when their respective friends discover that they share a secret garden…
Accused of treason, they then become neither more nor less the Romeo and Juliet of the establishment. During a school trip, the tension is such that Anya decides to run away in the middle of the night in the forest… The danger of life or death thus becomes real in the eyes of the parents. Among them, the director, Laurence (Clotilde Courau), is helpless in the face of the growing animosity among young people… and adults.
Thanks to a refreshing interpretation, the talented young actors of this fiction perfectly transcribe the carefree childhood. Between self-affirmation and the desire to belong to a group, Hafsia Herzi describes on screen the decisive issues experienced during this period of life.
As for the “adults” of the cast, Clotilde Courau is very convincing in this role of outdated woman both professionally and personally, since Laurence is Nathan’s mother. Djanis Bouzyani brings all his humor to the scenes and Lizzie Brocheré and Jérémie Laheurte accurately embody Anya’s parents, themselves in crisis following their change of life.
La cour is a successful, fine and pretty TV movie not to be missed.