Poil de carotte (2003)

François, a teenage boy with red hair, malicious eye and a face riddled with freckles, called "Carrot hair" looks pretty good in his skin. But when summer arrives, while his classmates think about fishing for tadpoles, swimming and family vacations, he wonders how to please his mother, a woman with three children, from a provincial middle class. He is in fact a prey to permanent anxiety, that of maternal love. Because everything shows that she hates her youngest child. Criticism thrown into a creeping tone of incessant vexations and mockery, through endless orders and chores, she does not spare him anything. Between a compassionate but absent father, and an indifferent brother and sister he therefore undergoes the persecutions of his mother, without saying anything, under the disapproving eye of the maid, Agathe. His only moments of joy stolen from the vigilance of his mother are those passed in the company of his friend and confidant Remy. Why this hate, this different treatment between him and his elders? What lies behind these freckles that his mother rejects? Assumptions follow one another: adoption? adultery? unknown mother? unknown father?