An old man in a dressing gown and slippers is abandoned by his family at a motorway service station on the first day of the summer holidays. Taken to a care home, he is given the nickname ‘Mischka’ by Gégène, an orderly who soon decides that neither of them has any reason to stay put.

Bathed in golden light and featuring Stévenin’s wife and three of his children, Mischka, Jean-François Stevenin’s final and most personal film, follows a ragtag cast of characters through the fields, backroads, and service stations of the French countryside. Some are searching for long-lost family members, others have been left to the margins. Over the course of the film, these outcasts — the escaped old man, the orderly, two runaway teenagers, a Roma singer — elliptically disperse and coalesce, forming a provisional family united only by their digressive search for love. Concluding with camcorder footage of his daughter backstage at a Johnny Hallyday concert, Mischka is Stévenin’s ode to the fleeting moments when this earth might feel like home.

This is the UK premiere of Mischka.