Father of my Children

Le père de mes enfants
a film by Mia Hansen-Løve

Grégoire Canvel has everything a man could want. A wife he loves, three delightful children and a stimulating job. He's a film producer. Discovering talented filmmakers and developing films that fit his conception of the cinema, free and true to life, is precisely his reason for living, his vocation. It fulfils him and Grégoire devotes almost all his time and energy to his work. He's hyperactive, he never stops, except at weekends, which he spends in the country with his family – gentle interludes, as precious as they are fragile.

Grégoire is an independent film producer who runs a well-respected, Paris based production company, Moon Films. For Grégoire, his work is his life, and while he loves his wife Sylvia and their three daughters Clémence, Valentine and Billie, during the week he is practically a stranger to them. He makes a point of spending each weekend with his family at their country house, but even then separating Grégoire from his cellphone is all but impossible, and Sylvia and the girls are reaching the end of their patience with him and his obsession with work. Though there's no question that Grégoire is devoted to Moon Films, he has kept a secret from Sylvia and his daughters about the state of the company, and it's not until his sudden, desperate act of suicide which forces Sylvia into leadership of the company that they come to understand the real reasons behind his unrelenting schedule.

This stunning and outstanding film explores the consequences of Grégoire's suicide on his family and his collaborators – examining the deep sorrow experienced by his wife and daughters, the feeling of unacceptable loss, and of the resentment against the deceased who abandoned them. It is loosely based on a real story examining the central aspect of family love. Mia Hansen-Løve took her inspiration from two real-life models, Humbert Balsan, a brilliant film producer who took his life at the age of 51 when he realised he would go bankrupt, and Donna Balsan, his wife, who for all her grief, did her utmost to save Ognon Pictures, her husband's company, after his death.

The director explains that the making of the film stems from her encounter with Humbert Balsan, whom she first met in early 2004, a year before his suicide. "He had an exceptional warmth, elegance and aura. His energy, passion for films and sensitivity, which I took to be an invincible inner beauty, are what made me write the movie. Of course, there is also his suicide. The feelings of failure and despair that it reveals are overwhelming, but that doesn't replace the rest. It doesn't become the only truth. I wanted the film to express the paradox of contradictory movements within the same person, the conflict that can occur between light and darkness, strength and vulnerability, the desire to live and the urge to die."