A film about the disabled breaks records in France

A comedy filmed by an actor and with a group of disabled people has become a social phenomenon and the biggest box office hit France since the covid crisis.

“Un p’tit truc en plus” (“A little extra”) tells the adventures of a father and his son who, fleeing from the police, take refuge in a holiday camp for disabled young people.

The film’s distributor, Pan Distribution, announced last weekend on its Instagram account that it had surpassed five million admissions, beating not only the second part of the “Dune” saga but another of the film’s favorites. French audience: “Asterix and Obelix and the Middle Kingdom”, which in 2023 had achieved 4.6 million viewers.

The director, Artus, plays the small-time criminal who, together with his father (Clovis Cornillac), desperately decides to pretend that you are a disabled person and your specialized educator to hide in the holiday colony.

The film manages to provoke laughter alongside the disabled, all of them amateur actors, not at their expense.

Producers’ fears

The making of this film was not easy at all, many producers were reluctant, Artus recalled to the press at the Cannes Festival, where the film was presented out of competition.

At 36 years old, this comedy actor managed to teach them a lesson with his first film.

“In the somewhat anxious times we are living in, this film feels very good,” and allows us to discover “a population that we do not often see” on the big screen, he explained.

The film is a “social phenomenon” without falling into sentimentality or political correctness, in the opinion of Eric Marti, from the consulting firm Comscore.

“It appeals to inclusion, but seriously. It’s not a cliché. It’s simple, fun, exciting and respectful,” he explained.

French cinema has experienced unexpected successes like this film in recent years.

“The Bélier Family”, released in 2014, showed how a teenager lives with her family, all of them deaf. It was the biggest box office success of the last decade.

And a greater success was achieved by “The Untouchables”, about the relationship between a rich quadriplegic and his caregiver, the actor Omar Sy. A film that achieved 19.5 million viewers and became an international success.

The case of “Simon of the Mountain”

“Un p’tit truc en plus” coincided in Cannes with the Argentine film “Simón de la Montaña”, also debut film, and winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize.

Directed by Federico Luis and performed by Lorenzo Ferro, the film narrates the friendship that an asocial young man forges with a group of boys who have some type of mental handicap.

“I feel that in general people tend to relate to people who are most similar to themselves,” Federico Luis explained to AFP before the premiere of “Simon of the Mountain.”

“I think that it is very worth making the effort to interact with different people: you access the most beautiful thing that human beings have, which is their great breadth and infinite complexity,” he added.