“La Vraie Famille” by Fabien Gorgeart, a moving film about the uprooting of a child from his foster family

After telling in his first film Diane has the shoulders, the story of a woman lending her belly to a couple of friends, Fabien Gorgeart tells in The True Family, his second feature film, that of a child taken away from his foster family to return to live with his father. In theaters February 16, 2022.

Since he was a year and a half old, Simon (Gabriel Pavie) has been taken in by a foster family. His father (Félix Moati Moati), depressed after the death of his wife, found himself unable to take care of him. The transplant took so well that Simon considers his foster family his “real family”. He calls Anna (Mélanie Thierry) “mom”, considers Jules and Adrien, like his brothers. Only the father of the foster family (Lyes Salem) remains at a slight distance, because Simon has a father, whom he sees once a month.

Simon is now 6 years old, and lives an almost “normal” family life, with its joys and its tensions, until the day when social assistance for children announces to Anna that Simon’s father wants him back…

This story, Fabien Gorgeart, the director, knows it well. “When I was little, my family took in a child, who stayed with us from eighteen months to six years old, just like in The Real Family”. An experience so striking for him that he has always wanted to make a film of it, to “transforming this personal memory, so emotionally charged, into fiction, and, thus, giving it a more universal scope”.

How to tell this tragic story while keeping a distance? That’s what Fabien Gorgeart tried (and succeeded) with this film, which accurately and without bias reflects the difficulties and suffering that all the protagonists face. The child, the welcoming family, the father… they all have to go through the turmoil that rages at this tragic moment of separation.

By welcoming Simon, Anna exercises a profession. But how to stay in his place? The film shows the fusional relationship of the young woman with Simon, which passes through the body, the looks, the gestures, then the pain of separation, at the height of this attachment, strong and visceral. The camera also captures Simon’s complicity with his “brothers”, and the father of his foster family, so benevolent, so fair in his relationship with the child, and also Simon’s stiffness when he is with his “real “father who is “like an uncle he sees from time to time”.