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"J'ai mal à ma maman", produced with the Uccle art school's film workshop, continues the same themes thirty years on, in a more fictionalized mode, but intertwined (“Why do you think you're Jewish? Because I hurt my mom”): the mother and the fantasized condition of being Jewish. The relationship with women other than the mother also appears, whose love carries a final note of hope, rare in Paquot's work.
Director
Status
Released
Original Language
FR

In 1953, a sensitive French boy finds out from a neighbor that his family's Jewish. François Grimbert becomes a physician, and gradually peels the layers of his buried family history which resulted in his difficult upbringing, raised as Catholic by his "Aryan" appearing parents. His athletic father labored to stamp out stereotypical Jewish characteristics he perceived in his son, to keep the family's many secrets, as most relatives fought in World War II, and later were hauled off to labor and death camps by the Gestapo.

Young Violetta and her mother Hannah are a peculiar couple. Ten-year-old Violetta lives a quiet life with her grandmother, while her mother Hannah is an unpredictable photographer who lives off of the generosity of others. When Hannah forces her daughter to pose as a model, Violetta finds her life with her loving grandmother turned upside down.The resulting pictures quickly become a sensation for the trendy 70's Paris art scene, and Violetta finds herself caught in between her new stature as an art muse and her dull childhood.