Ioanis Nuguet

“When I was one year old I was already walking. At two, I was eating dirt. At three, my father was in prison. At four, I begged with my sister. At seven, I came to France.” Those are the words of Spartacus, a Roma child who, at 13, has already accumulated the experiences of several lifetimes. He and his sister Cassandre, 10, scrape out a living with an alcoholic, melodramatic father and a mother who begs them to free her from her husband’s tyranny. With the help of an exceptional social worker, they manage to detach themselves from their terrible parents and experience childhood as they never could before.

Between Bali, where Ioanis Nuguet lived and found refuge after the sudden death of his father in a diving accident, and Provence, where he grew up and where his mother lived before she, too, died of cancer, the director weaves together fragments of his family history: a mosaic of places and impressions where life and death, beauty and pain, love and loss are intimately intertwined.