“When I discover my mother, she lies unconscious, a syringe stuck in her tied up arm, her fingertips and bluish lips.” Michelle Halbheer’s story in The Children of Platzspitz is freezing. The young woman was a child in the early 1990s, when Zurich made headlines with its open drug scene, located in the heart of the city, behind the Swiss National Museum. Following the closure of Platzspitz and then Letten, her mother, a drug addict, was sent back to her home town. For Michelle then began a journey to the end of hell, which she tells in first person, in a simple and direct way, in a story published in German in 2013.
From this strong book, Pierre Monnard has drawn a moving film in his way of following the labyrinthine journey of a preteen girl, Mia, unable to bring himself to let her mother escape her completely, that her promise to turn her back drugs is just wishful thinking. Daughter of drug addict in a peaceful village in the German-speaking countryside, here she is judged, forced to invent a more joyful parallel world, where an imaginary friend would come to reassure her by singing a folk standard popularized by the Beach Boys.
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