“Qui brille au combat” (“Who Shines in Battle”) marks actor Joséphine Japy’s first time behind the camera, and she goes straight for the deepest place she knows: her own family story, and the impact of her sister’s disability on every person who loves her.
A debut feature forged from 25 years of uncertainty
The film opens in France on 31 December and centres on Bertille, a young woman living with Phelan-McDermid syndrome, a rare genetic condition that often leads to intellectual disability, language delays and autism spectrum traits.
For Japy, the project started not with an artistic impulse, but with a phone call. Her parents had spent 25 years in what doctors call a “diagnostic odyssey” – years of not knowing exactly what their daughter was living with. When the name of the syndrome finally arrived, it unlocked something very specific for the director.
After decades of medical uncertainty, a single diagnosis gave Japy the words she needed to tell her family’s story.
She has described bursting into tears in a taxi as her mother listed the key facts: the name of the disease, what it implies, and the reassurance that Bertille would not die from it. The call also came with another piece of information: Japy herself did not carry the gene. Relief, grief, anger and clarity collided at once.
From that moment, the screenplay began to take shape. She only felt ready to write once the rage and sense of injustice had eased enough to make space for nuance. The film is not a revenge on fate. It is an attempt to look at that fate from all sides.
A family under pressure, not a “disability drama”
On the surface, “Qui brille au combat” could have been pitched as a “film about disability”. Japy refused that label from the outset. She did not want to turn her sister into a symbol, or her parents into case studies.
The cast hints at the emotional weight of the project. Mélanie Laurent plays the mother, a woman who has built her days, nights and identity around caring for her disabled daughter. Pierre-Yves Cardinal plays the father, more distant, fragile, often tempted to step aside rather than confront the situation. And Angelina Woreth embodies Marion, the other sister, forced into responsibility long before adulthood while still trying to figure out who she is.
Rather than a “subject film”, Japy aims for an intimate chronicle of love, fatigue, sacrifice and the stubborn need for hope.
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The narrative is less about medical details and more about the domestic choreography that forms around a person who needs constant attention: who picks up the slack, who disappears, who breaks down in private. The disability is the gravitational centre, but not the only story.
Marion, the sister who wants a future of her own
The locomotive of the film
For Japy, Marion is “the locomotive” of the story. Parents, she argues, are anchored in a fairly defined place: they will always be parents of a disabled child. Their questions revolve around survival, couple stability, and the tiny margins of freedom they can negotiate for themselves.
Marion, by contrast, stands on the threshold of adult life. University choices, moving out, first loves, leaving the family home: all the classic rites of passage are theoretically available to her, yet she struggles to picture any of them.
- She organises care schedules instead of planning parties.
- She acts as a third parent before getting a chance to be fully adolescent.
- She feels guilty whenever she thinks about leaving.
- She rarely asks herself what she truly wants.
Woreth explains that the character’s emotions are turned up to maximum: love, frustration, confusion, resentment, tenderness. All the normal storms of adolescence, multiplied by the presence of a sister who undeniably suffers more, and therefore always comes first.
Silent storms and invisible sacrifices
Marion is not written as a cliché rebel, nor as the saintly sibling. She neither screams at her parents every night nor dissolves into permanent martyrdom. Instead, she carries a kind of muted intensity, full of unspoken thoughts.
The actress leans on a simple observation: teenagers often do not talk, even when their inner life is in chaos. When a disabled sibling is in the picture, the unspoken grows even larger. There never seems to be a good moment to admit you’re jealous of the attention, or exhausted by care tasks, or just desperate for something as banal as boredom.
The film lingers on those moments when Marion swallows her words, convinced that her pain does not quite deserve space.
A measured fight against cliché and pathos
Resisting the “mother courage” narrative
Japy set a clear rule during writing and rehearsals: no one in this family would be reduced to a label. She did not want a “mother courage” who suffers nobly in every frame, nor a sobbing figure who breaks down in melodramatic monologues.
With Laurent, the work focused on restraint: a woman who cannot afford to cry because if she cracks, the entire organisation around her daughter may collapse. With the actress playing Bertille, the director also banned any direct imitation of her real sister. The goal was to build a character from empathy and observation, not from copying gestures.
At each stage, the team pushed back against the easy route: heroic caregiver, angelic disabled child, monstrous absent father, or hysterical teenager. Softening those edges makes the story more unsettling – and, arguably, closer to reality.
When a personal film becomes political
Japy initially resisted the idea that “Qui brille au combat” might be a social film with a message. She feared being seen as a spokesperson for every family dealing with disability, a role she never asked for and does not fully trust.
That stance shifted during the film’s screening at Cannes. In the audience, she recognised a handful of faces wearing the same private fatigue she knew from home: siblings, parents, long-term carers. Their reactions suggested the film had tapped into something shared and rarely articulated.
Since Cannes, Japy says she is “co-constructing” the film with families and carers who recognise their own battles on screen.
One frustration remains constant for her: disability tends to appear last in political agendas, squeezed in when other topics have been exhausted. The film does not campaign for any specific reform, but it opens a space where that neglect becomes difficult to ignore.
“Who shines in battle”: a title loaded with meaning
The title is not just poetic. While writing, Japy looked up the meaning of first names in her family and discovered that “Bertille” can be read as “she who shines in battle”. Her parents chose it without knowing their daughter’s future, yet it now seems uncannily prescient.
Calling the film “Qui brille au combat” is, in her eyes, almost like naming it “Bertille”. She removed the word “she” to broaden the scope. In the story, everyone is fighting, in different ways.
| Character | Their battle | How they shine |
|---|---|---|
| Bertille | Living with Phelan-McDermid syndrome | Persisting in daily gestures, relationships and small victories |
| Mother | Carrying the mental and physical load of care | Maintaining routines and refusing self-pity |
| Father | Confronting distance and emotional fragility | Trying, clumsily, to reconnect with his family |
| Marion | Building her own identity without abandoning her sister | Allowing herself to imagine a future beyond the family home |
For Japy and Woreth, the answer to the question in the title is clear: every person bound to Bertille by love is also on that battlefield, also catching some kind of light.
What Phelan-McDermid syndrome means off screen
Phelan-McDermid syndrome is considered a rare disease. It is usually caused by a deletion on chromosome 22, affecting the SHANK3 gene, which plays a role in brain development. Symptoms vary widely but often include delayed speech, low muscle tone and learning difficulties.
In daily life, that can translate into years of physiotherapy, speech therapy, and special education pathways. Families often navigate a maze of paperwork, waiting lists and inconsistent support services. The film does not turn these elements into a policy lecture, but they quietly underpin almost every scene.
For siblings, the condition reshapes childhood and adolescence. They might help with basic care, translate for their brother or sister in social settings, or mediate between parents and professionals. Research into “young carers” suggests long-term impacts on mental health, career choices and relationships, even when siblings deeply love the person they help.
How cinema can change conversations about disability
Social workers, teachers and doctors in both France and English-speaking countries often note the same thing: families feel unseen. A film like “Qui brille au combat” does not fix structural problems, but it can change how these families talk about themselves.
Several practical ripple effects are likely once the film circulates more widely:
- Schools may use it as a starting point for discussions around inclusion and young carers.
- Support groups might screen it to spark conversations between parents and siblings who rarely share their feelings.
- Medical teams could recommend it to professionals in training to show the emotional landscape behind clinical files.
For viewers without direct experience of disability, the film offers a chance to think about everyday gestures: offering respite care to a friend, not assuming a parent “chooses” isolation, or simply asking siblings how they are doing, not only how the disabled child is.
Japy’s choice to keep the tone measured, refusing both hero worship and tragic spectacle, may actually make the story more unsettling. The family on screen looks close to many others. Their “battle” is not a distant myth. It sits next door, at the school gate, on the late-night bus, among people whose shine often goes unnoticed until a film like this holds the light a little longer.
Originally posted 2026-02-15 17:46:38.