Stella

Paris, 1977. Eleven-year-old Stella's parents run a bar, and she knows more about poker than about grammar, because the tables in that bar are where she grew up. That year she starts at a well-regarded school and finds a completely different world there: children who read books, go on holiday and have quiet houses. Learning to move between the two worlds is something she has to work out by herself. Sylvie Verheyde's film draws heavily on her own childhood. Léora Barbara plays Stella. It shows France at the end of the seventies from a child's height, and it never asks you to pity that child.