French Film Festival Aotearoa| Other People's Children

Drama | 104 minutes | Rated M - sex scenes, offensive language, nudity, and drug use

Featuring a career-best Virginie Efira, award-winning writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski’s enchanting and profoundly moving new romantic drama follows a woman whose outlook on life is upended when she starts a passionate relationship with a single father-of-one.

40-year-old Parisian high school teacher Rachel (a radiant Efira) loves her life: she’s inspired by her work and is close to her friends, sister and widowed father. When she meets a man in her community guitar class - the charming and recently-separated Ali (Roschdy Zem) - Rachel commences a relationship not only with him, but also his four-year-old daughter, Leila Gradually, she’s drawn into their world, helping Ali by collecting Leila after school and looking after her on the nights she stays with them; the three start to share holidays together. But there can be no denying Leila already has a mother (Chiara Mastroianni), and Rachel’s yearning for a family of her own is only growing stronger…

Utterly involving and insightful, other people’s children thoughtfully revolves around questions of belonging, connection and emotional risk to depict not only one woman’s search for fulfillment, but what constitutes a rewarding and meaningful life.