Other People's Children

East Coast Premiere

This French romantic drama stars Virginie Efira (MJFF 2021 film An Impossible Love and Paul Verhoeven’s Elle and Benedetta) as a teacher whose new relationship with a single father becomes complicated when she begins to connect with his young daughter. A piercingly resonant film from French writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski, Other People’s Children centers on a 40-year-old French Jewish woman for whom new love awakens an intense and unexpected desire for motherhood. For Rachel, each moment with her new boyfriend is pure bliss. They share everything, including his precious four-year-old daughter Leïla. The situation is precarious: the more time Rachel spends with Leïla, the more she cannot help but feel like a mother to the child. But Leïla already has a mother with whom she spends half her time. Rachel increasingly and happily takes on the duties around Leila’s care, but soon feels that she has the responsibilities, but not the rights that go with parenthood. As her relationship with her boyfriend becomes more serious, she sees that there are boundaries, established long before she came into the picture, that she will never be invited to cross.