Les Invisibles
French social-realist drama about a daytime shelter for homeless women. In three months the shelter is set to close. The social workers running the centre will do whatever it takes to reintegrate the women back into society.
Following the municipal government’s decision to shut down the institution, largely due to the optics of meagre reintegration statistics, the shelter’s conscientious all-female staff launches into action to help secure employment for as many women as possible. However, their increasingly assertive coaching sessions compel the social workers to confront the ways in which they, too, might be focusing more on printed résumés than people.
In this buoyant character-driven study indebted to Stephen Frears and Ken Loach, director Louis-Julien Petit lays bare the broken and oppressive systems plaguing Paris’s approach to homelessness, while also emphasizing the social element of social work.