The BFI have released the UK Trailer for Swiss filmmaker Fred Baillif’s La Mif (The Fam).
After making big waves at it’s world premiere at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, BFI were quick to get the rights for this powerful, moving film. The film did pick up the Grand Prix for Best Film in the Generation 14plus competition at the festival. That success continued in various other festivals winning awards at Namur, Zurich and recently received its UK premiere at the 2021 BFI London Film Festival.
The film is an intimate, naturalistic drama that offers a glimpse of life within a residential care home for at-risk teenage girls. The film is very personal to Baillif who several years working as a social worker in and out of the care homes in Geneva.
The film follows a group of girls who live in residential care all coming from difficult backgrounds. Sharing their own joys and pains, however things fall apart when an incident happens. Highlighting the fragility of the care system.
LA MIF (Mif is the French slang word for family) is set in a residential care home in Geneva, where a group of teenage girls from difficult backgrounds live as a community with social workers. Sharing joy and pain, the forced “family” experience creates unexpected tensions and intimacies. When an incident arises, the fall-out reveals the weaknesses of the outdated contemporary social care system.
The film was developed over a period of two years by Fred Baillif, a former social worker, with the collaboration of non-professional actors made up of residents and staff of a children’s home.
Exploring its characters’ stories individually and collectively, LA MIF is an empathetic and emotional examination of the juvenile care system, ploughing the line between documentary and fiction.
The ensemble cast includes Claudia Grob, Anaïs Uldry, Kassia Da Costa, Joyce Esther Ndayisenga, Charlie Areddy, Amélie Tonsi, Amandine Golay and Sara Tulu.
The BFI will release La Mif in UK and Irish cinemas from 25th February.
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