Archive of films My Brother Is Getting Married / Mon frère se marie

Switzerland / France
2006, 90 min

Section: Another View
Year: 2007

Vinh is getting married and his real mother travels from Vietnam to Switzerland to take part in the festivities. The Swiss family who adopted Vinh fell apart years ago and each member lives his or her own life now. For the Vietnamese, however, the family is an unassailable community and so everyone gets together to try to keep up the pretence of perfect family harmony. One of the main roles was played by Jean-Luc Bideau.

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.

Contacts

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Tel: +33 153 103 399
Fax: +33 153 103 398
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About the film

Color, 35 mm

Section:	Another View

Director:	Jean-Stéphane Bron
Screenplay:	Jean-Stéphane Bron, Karine Sudan
Dir. of Photography:	Matthieu Poirot-Delpech
Music:	Christian Garcia
Editor:	Karine Sudan
Producer:	Philippe Martin, Thierry Spycher, Elena Tatti
Production:	Box Productions
Cast:	Jean-Luc Bideau, Aurore Clément, Cyril Troley, Quoc Dung Nguyen, Delphine Chuillot
Contact:	Playtime