Marie Poupinet

Gianina, a young Romanian, works as a housekeeper for a bourgeois family in Bordeaux. In the evenings, she rehearses the role of a maid with an amateur theater troupe in an adaptation of The Diary of a Chambermaid by Octave Mirbeau. She takes care of Louen, her employers’ son, while her own daughter is growing up far from her, in Romania. The maternal absence deepens into a wound but, as Christmas approaches, the promise of a reunion begins to take shape.

Gabriel enters second. Her father has just died and her mother, a cleaning lady, wants at all costs to finance her studies in a private and expensive high school. But Gabriel is performing poorly and feels guilty, because his mother sacrifices herself for him and struggles with financial problems.