Corentin Brunie

Glenn, a punk on edge, searches for his missing god in a psychiatric home.

In the cold of the Berlin winter, regulars gather every evening in a timeless bar: ‘the Kaktus’. In this increasingly rare kind of place, where everything is an excuse to play and have fun, everyone finds warmth and a place to share their secrets.

Ira Melnichenko, a young Ukrainian refugee in Switzerland with her brother, creates a doll in her own image, through which she revisits the story of a family torn apart by the death of her father, a 2D animator in Kyiv, destroyed by alcohol and dereliction. In her eyes – those of a child forced to grow up too fast – we read tenderness and bewilderment in the face of a vanished world.

From his birth in the South of France up to his military service, “When Dad joined Mum” retraces the first twenty years of Eric’s life and the upbringing he received as a boy who was brought up by a single mum. Through Super 8 reels, the story of an impossible emancipation unfolds as well as the portrait of a woman being devoured by her pain.