ALL TO PLAY FOR

Rien à perdre

West Coast Premiere | France | 2023 | Drama | 102 min | In French with English subtitles
Directed by: Delphine Deloget
Written by: Delphine Deloget, Camille Fontaine, Olivier Demangel
Produced by: Olivier Delbosc (Curiosa Films), Caroline Nataf (Unité), Cédric Iland (Umedia)
Cinematography: Guillaume Schiffman
Film Editing: Béatrice Herminie
Original Score: Nicolas Giraud
Cast: Virginie Efira (Sylvie), Félix Lefebvre (Jean-Jacques), Arieh Worthalter (Hervé), Mathieu Demy (Alain), India Hair (Mademoiselle Henry)
International Sales: France TV Distribution

Gifted actor Virginie Efira takes on the monolithic French social system as Sylvie, the single mother of two boys, in Delphine Deloget’s début feature, All to Play For.  One night her younger son, Sofiane, burns himself making French fries while she’s at work, bartending in a raucous cub. Before long, child protective services come knocking at her door to take him away and place him in a foster home. The indomitable Sylvie is determined to beat the bureaucratic system and get her son back, by hook or by crook. However, the obstacles keep multiplying and she’s gradually pushed to the ethical brink, in a world where any parent who falls outside of societal norms is open to judgement and persecution.

Delphine Deloget began her long career as a documentary filmmaker with the short Juin 1944, le Débarquement (2003), which she co-directed with Christian Gandjbakhch & Mathurin Peschet. Her documentary feature No London Today (2008) premiered at the parallel ACID section of the Cannes Film Festival. Several television docs and doc series followed, including Toutes les télés du monde (2006-2009), La Case de l’oncle Doc (2011), Le Père Noël et le cowboy (2012), Voyage en Barbarie (2014), Snapshots of History (2017), and L’Amour de l’œuvre (2018). She wrote and directed her first narrative short, Tigre, in 2019. The script for All to Play For, her first narrative feature, was initiated at La Fémis l’Atelier Scénario, and premiered as an official selection in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film was also screened at the 2023 Deauville Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val, where a jury of Anglo-Saxon journalists honored it with the Prix d’Ornano-Valenti, presented by the Fran­co-Amer­i­can Cul­tur­al Fund, and celebrating a French feature film début.