Winner of the Prix d’Ornano for Best French Debut as judged by foreign film journalists in France, Ludovic Boukherma, Zoran Boukherma, Marielle Gautier, and Hugo P. Thomas’ dramatic comedy is a funny and ultimately deeply affecting amalgam of fiction and reality based on the life of non-professional actor Daniel Vannet. He plays Willy, a slow, socially challenged 50-year-old man who lives with his twin brother Michel (Vannet again) and their parents on a hardscrabble farm in Normandy. After Michel hangs himself, Willy is bereft—doubly so when his parents say they are going to institutionalise him. ‘Get stuffed!’, he says. ‘I will have a place of my own, a scooter, and some friends!’ And off he goes…

At the centre of this droll, poignant, and visually ambitious film is a fantastic and totally realistic performance from Vannet. As he tells us in a voiceover at the beginning, his twin brother and only companion really did hang himself. Locals play extras and the depressed town of Caudebec is shown in a realistic light (one charming joke has Willy seeing Caudebec as the metropolis of his dreams). The film doesn’t sugar-coat anything: Willy is not a sentimental caricature (in fact, he can be frightening when angry) and small-town attitudes—homophobic and otherwise—are shown for what they are. As Willy grapples with the vagaries of life on his own, a moving portrait of a tragically stunted man (Vannet only learned to read at 45) coming to life emerges. You can’t help but be affected. ‘[Vannet] delivers a touching and vanity-free performance that combines understated melancholy with deadpan drolleries.’—Boyd van Hoeij, Hollywood Reporter