She starts pinning and taping photographs onto the walls, creating collages of material that over the course of the film start to evolve into 3D sculptures, hanging from the ceiling, building out from the walls like bas-reliefs. In what is obviously a stage set dressed to look like an empty Parisian apartment, Mona Achache is met sifting through some of the many storage boxes her mother left behind. Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings)Ĭast: Marion Cotillard, Mona Achache, Marie Bunel, Marie-Christine Adam, Pierre Aussedat, Jacques Boudet, Didier Flamand

At the same time, it shines a light on some of the darkest parts of family life, especially the complexities of mother-daughter love. The result is a fascinating psychodrama - with extra scoops of meta on top - that showcases the talents of all the story’s women, especially Cotillard and Achache. Achieving a remarkable casting coup that will make all the difference for the film’s commercial prospects while richly enhancing its emotional texture, Achache persuades French superstar Marion Cotillard ( La Vie en rose, Inception) to play Carole. As tender, painful and intimate as an open caesarean scar, writer-director Mona Achache’s drama-documentary Little Girl Blue examines the fraught relationships between three generations of women within the director’s own family, starting with her literary grandmother Monique Lange, her mother Carole Achache and herself.Īlthough narrated by Achache, who “plays” herself throughout, the focus is above all on the troubled child of the midcentury Carole, who committed suicide in 2016 and left behind an enormous cache of letters, journals, publications, photographs and documents.

A little life blurb