The Jury was deeply moved by this intimately told story about a very special family: two wonderful boys and their courageous mother, living in a deprived de-industrializing community in Northern France. Surrounded by poverty and unemployment, they have also to face bullying, and a general lack of perspective and support. While it focuses on an individual family, this film depicts the portrait of a whole region and its crisis, and helps to understand better some of the deep fractures that currently go through many of our societies.
Thanks to the quality of its narration and filmmaking, it’s poetic style, it’s carefully casted protagonists, COAL HEAP KIDS creates an individual narrative so strong that we as viewers fully engage with the characters and their story. But at the same time, we are brought into a deeper level of reflection and understanding about what is going wrong in their world, which is our world, the world around us.