La Traviata, My Brothers and I

A long, sun-kissed summer in their downmarket coastal hometown lies before Nour and his older brothers. Nour is 13, old enough to work and so become more of ‘a man’, with each brother offering a version of what that could mean: Mo the cheeky lothario, Heidi the wily criminal, and oldest Abel the stern leader. Nour is drawn to the singing classes he hears on his summer job, and this ‘feminine’ calling clashes with macho culture. A warm, vivid film that conjures empathy for all types of ‘bro’.

Director Yohan Manca on what influenced him to become a filmmaker: ‘To start with, popular French comedies that were on TV. Like Le Splendid theatre group for example, I think they’re pure geniuses! There’s also the film by Les Inconnus, The Three Brothers, which I must have seen at least 2000 times. And then a little later on, I discovered Italian cinema of the 60s and 70s: Scola, Fellini and Antonioni. As someone who left school too early and didn’t go to film school, Martin Scorsese’s films and his comments gave me a lot of strength: “To learn how to make films, you need to watch the films”.’ On what he hoped to say with his debut film: ‘Sometimes an encounter miraculously takes us down a different path, and art or culture can make us think differently, question things and save us.’