Written and directed by Swiss filmmaker Fred Baillif, the film takes place in a home for troubled youth in Geneva. The teenage girls who live here all have their own issues and personal traumas, but they make a good team and form a kind of modern patchwork family. Lora (Claudia Grob) is the director of the home and a mother figure for the girls — someone they can always talk to and rely on. Viewers get to know the seven girls’ backstories, in which sexual violence and difficult family relationships are an everyday reality. The girls themselves are the greatest source of support for one another, and their storylines present not only their ups and downs of growing up, but also their many difficulties related to class, race and economic challenges. The Fam won the Grand Prix in the Generation 14plus competition at last year’s Berlinale. Baillif, a former social worker himself, creates a mosaic-like structure for the film, resulting from a close collaboration with people who live in a home much like the one seen on screen. The intense, intimate relationships amongst the characters show how family can be defined in terms of social and cultural community rather than biological bloodlines.