My Brother Is Getting Married

Colour, 35 mm
Switzerland, France, 2006, 90 min
Section: Another View

Synopsis

Weddings, with their firmly established rules, provide filmmakers with an attractive setting for dramatic or comic situations where all kinds of character traits come out into the open which would otherwise remain hidden. And this is also the case in the film about a Swiss family which once took in the little Vietnamese boy Vinh as a brother to the family’s two siblings. Now the adult Vinh is marrying a Swiss girl and his real mum is coming to the wedding, with whom he has thus far only communicated by letter. Vinh begs his long-divorced Swiss parents and bickering brother and sister to play the role of the idyllic happy family, just for a few days while she is visiting. They all have the will in them to have a go, but this doesn’t stop outbursts of bitterness, reproach and anger at the sense of injustice both parents and children still harbour within them as a result of their shared past. But coming to terms with former conflicts, misunderstandings and themselves as well doesn’t necessarily have to be a grim process...

About the director

Jean-Stéphane Bron (b. 1969, Lausanne, Switzerland) initially studied film in Italy at the film school headed by Ermanno Olmi, and then went on to study directing at ECAL (L’Ecole Cantonal d’Art de Lausanne), where he gained a diploma in 1995. He made his first feature-length documentary Connu de nos services, well received at the Locarno festival, in 1997. He continued making documentaries, filming three major projects, one of which, La bonne conduite (1999), won the “Special Vision” award presented by the New York Times. In 2004 he won the Swiss Film Prize as Best Documentarist. The comedy with its serious undertones My Brother Is Getting Married, whose script he co-wrote with his permanent editor Karine Sudan, is his feature film debut.