The Bélier Family

Eric Lartigau's The Bélier Family (La Famille Bélier) opened in 2014 and became the second-highest-grossing French film of its year, with over 7.4 million admissions in France alone. The film won Louane Emera the César for Most Promising Actress and was nominated for three further Césars including Best Film. The 2021 Apple TV+ American remake CODA — substantially expanded into a more developed American-Massachusetts setting — went on to win three Academy Awards including Best Picture; the original French version is the foundational text.

Paula Bélier (Louane Emera, the French television-singing-show graduate cast in her debut feature role) is the only hearing member of the Bélier family — a tight-knit Norman dairy-farming household where everyone else (her parents, her younger brother) is deaf. The family's continuing daily operation depends on Paula's role as the household's interpreter to the broader hearing world: at the dairy market, in dealings with the local mayor's office, and across the family's negotiations with the town's farming community. When her music teacher Mr Thomasson (Eric Elmosnino) discovers Paula's singing voice and pushes her toward an audition for the elite Paris music school Maîtrise de Radio France, the family's dependence on her is forced into the open.

Karin Viard and François Damiens, as Paula's parents, perform the deaf-character roles entirely in French Sign Language across the film. The film operates as broad-comic family drama with quietly serious undertones about parental dependence and adolescent ambition. Emera's central performance — including her own performance of Je vole by Michel Sardou as the central audition piece — anchored the film's emotional register and launched her continuing French-pop career.