The Bélier Family

Eric Lartigau's The Bélier Family (La Famille Bélier) opened in 2014 and was the second-highest-grossing French film of the year, with over 7.4 million admissions in France alone. It won Louane Emera the César for Most Promising Actress and was nominated for three more Césars, including Best Film. The 2021 Apple TV+ remake CODA, which moved the story to Massachusetts and expanded it considerably, went on to win three Academy Awards including Best Picture, but the French original came first.

Paula Bélier (Louane Emera, a graduate of a French television singing show, in her first feature role) is the only hearing member of the Bélier family, a tight-knit Norman dairy-farming household in which everyone else (her parents and her younger brother) is deaf. The family's day-to-day running depends on Paula as its interpreter to the hearing world: at the dairy market, in dealings with the mayor's office and in all their negotiations with the town's farming community. When her music teacher, Mr Thomasson (Eric Elmosnino), discovers her singing voice and pushes her towards 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, play their deaf characters entirely in French Sign Language. It is a broad comic family drama with serious undertones about parental dependence and adolescent ambition. Emera's performance, including her own singing of Je vole by Michel Sardou, carries the film's emotional weight, and it launched the French pop career she still has.