The emotion was palpable at the end of the screening of Louis-Julien Petit’s new film Squad presented at the Arras Film Festival. A film full of humanity which tells the story of Cathy, played by Audrey Lamy, who since childhood dreams of being the head of her own restaurant.
But nothing went as planned, and at 40, she found herself forced to take a job in a migrant hostel: “She has not yet realized her dream of becoming a chef. She is a little endearing as they say and she finds herself catapulted into this home for migrants, unaccompanied foreign minors, and she has to accept a little forced the job of canteen“, says Louis-Julien Petit.
The director signs here a film full of humanity, two years later The Invisibles, which dealt with the fight of social workers to reintegrate homeless women, and already shot in Hauts-de-France.
Cathy will open her kitchen and finally create her brigade with a handful of young people from the household and teach them the basics of cooking, and much more. “These young people who ask only to learn, who only ask to be useful, to do things … All of a sudden, she will tell herself that cooking, she is not going to do it alone , but with all these young people who have different cultures, who have a richness different from his own and it will become a real sharing“, explains Audrey Lamy.
At his side, we find François Cluzet, all benevolent and visibly very happy to have participated in the adventure: “The film is completely successful since we have a deep subject, this migration story, but on the other side we have something even more important, it’s how we form a team“. A resolutely optimistic film but one that will have to wait a bit to find out: the release is not scheduled until next March.
Squad, comedy by Louis-Julien Petit, with Audrey Lamy, François Cluzet, Chantal Neuwirth. Distribution Apollo Films – Released March 23, 2022.