THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – TO SEE
In Geneva, in the home for teenagers where she has been rebuilding herself since the death of her parents, Audrey, 17, is caught riding and kissing a 14-year-old boarder on the mouth. A few minutes ago, for justice, the girl was a victim. This was before the exchange of fluids, and consequently the deployment of the judicial machine: the duty educator called the police station, the police arrived, there were shouts and jolts, the judges were warned , the director was summoned, the home became single-sex again. And Audrey tells herself that, within three months, no one would have made a big deal out of it: she would have been 16, not big enough to be a predator. Sweater pulled up under the chest, bare stomach, she postpones her crazy desires, fueled by misunderstandings, towards older men.
From this incident passed like lightning, the Swiss director Fred Baillif, a former educator, works to describe the daily life of this refuge which is leaking, tossed between a sclerotic administration and a director close to its residents. Presented in February at the Berlinale, within the Generation 14plus competition, where it won the Grand Prix, shot in two weeks with actors from (particularly convincing) homes, The Mif (diminutive of “family”) looks towards a powerfully naturalistic cinema, with its improvised dialogues and everything you need to know about authoritarian but tolerant methods, monitors, the difficulty of living in a group, personal dramas , judges’ decisions, unexpected visits from parents, running away and tantrums.
sweet melancholy
Cut into short portraits edited in flashback – in each part, a boarder and her share of disturbances: they are victims of resigning parents, rape and domestic accident –, the film deploys as many points of view on the body- inaugural body, to tell the shock wave that threatens the fragile balance of this “mif”. In line with Heads up, by Emmanuelle Bercot, in 2015, and Placedby Nessim Chikhaoui, in 2022, but also films established in disadvantaged neighborhoods (Between the walls, by Laurent Cantet, in 2008, or girl gang, by Céline Sciamma, in 2014), there are outbursts, sobs, ” whore “ and “worshipful chicks” become the common lot of a certain realistic cinema, which tells how we get out of it when life does not start under the best auspices.
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