La Ch'tite Famille

This film was a complete surprise to me - and  very pleasant one.

I'd borrowed the DVD to watch the film before we decided to screen it and for a moment was surprised to notice several of what I took to be typos in the subtitles: it took me several minutes to realise that the subtitles were trying to replicate the bizarre accents of the Ch'tite family.

La Ch'tite famille

France 2018     107 minutes

Director:          Dany Boon

Starring:            Dany Boon, Line Renaud, Laurence Arne and Valerie Bonneton

“Picard is a langues d'oïl dialect of the Indo-European language family spoken in the northernmost part of France and southern Belgium. … Picard is referred to by different names as residents of Picardy simply call it Picard, but it is more commonly known as chti or chtimi in the more populated Nord-Pas-de-Calais (Romance Flanders around the metropolis of Lille and Douai, and northeast Artois around Béthune and Lens). … As of 2008, Picard native speakers amount to 700,000 individuals. Since its daily use had drastically declined, Picard was declared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) a "seriously endangered language".”

                                                                                                            Wikipedia

Valentin Duquenne is a famous and successful designer of furniture who claims to be an orphan as he is too ashamed to admit that he is the son of working-class scrap metal dealers from northern France. When his family arrive in Paris, on the pretext of wanting to celebrate his elderly mother’s birthday with him, his true identity is revealed and then, after a traffic accident causes him to lose his memory, the Ch'ti in him returns.

Dany Boon is a French comedian and a film maker who has appeared successfully on both stage and screen. His native region is the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and after he had made his name through his sketches and one man shows in 2003 he made a whole show in the dialect of ch’ti which although subtitled became a bestseller throughout the whole of France. In February 2008 he released Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis, a comedy based on prejudices held about the region, which became the highest grossing film of all-time at the French box office.

La Ch'tite famille is not specifically a sequel to Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis: Boon’s own description is that it is “closer to a spin-off project”. On its opening weekend in France it topped the French box office and grossed $16,739,183. 

Here is a link to the trailer: