My brother: our first crush of 2026 (review)

Friends, loves, troubles… Summer camp leaders, Shai and Djenaba discover adult life in the impressively tender second feature film from the directors of Les Pires.

In their web series Do you prefer? (Arte, 2020), Romane Guéret and Lise Akoka filmed the philosophical wanderings of two high school girls, Shaï and Djeneba between the roofs of the Place des Fêtes and the benches of Buttes-Chaumont. Do you prefer to have big butts or big breasts? Eat pork or never see your mother again? Money or love? A few years and a first feature film (The Worsts, 2022) later, direction Drôme, where the summer camp which employs Shai and Djeneba has decided to plant its sardines. And there you have it My brothera beautiful summer escape far from the concrete and tarmac gloom of the 19th arrondissement.

You’re not serious when you’re 17; we are a little more so when we are twenty. The enchanted parenthesis lasts only a short time, permeable to heartache and family problems. And the two protagonists drown in this existential maelstrom, this planned obsolescence of innocence, these socio-cultural determinisms. So much shifting sand that contrasts with the slight carelessness of the little humans in their charge. Those who still sleep with a pacifier, throw themselves on trampolines, are walled in silence or on the contrary, say everything that comes to mind. Those who, fed up with social networks, still let themselves be lulled by a Barbara who sings about her childhood…

My brother hits the mark in every way, just a learning story and social comedy as much as a laboratory probing an entire stratum of society via a sample of these millions of children who only know concrete towers. In The Worst already, disadvantaged youth – from the north of France, this time – were passing under the lens of a benevolent microscope, revealing in the process the raw talent of Mallory Wanecque. A larger-than-life drive for life that we find in Fanta Kebe and Shirel Nataf, “sisters” in arms and in heart in life and in death. With them, Amel Bent takes her first steps on the big screen, flanked by Idir Azougli, Suzanne de Baecque and Yuming Hey, three little UFOs of French cinema. A gaggle of battered silhouettes, certainly inherited from Our happy daysif the latter had germinated in the heights of the HLM.

By Romane Guéret and Lise Akoka. With Fanta Kebe, Shirel Nataf, Amel Bent… Duration 1h52. Released January 7, 2026