LA GRANDE FAMILLE

Type : auralize, scoring

Year : 2017

La Grande Famille is a journey from gloomy pasts into the present day, lived-in family community.

La Grande Famille is a documentary by Nuno Beirão Vieira and João Pedro Marnoto, filmed in France, that immerses the viewer in the daily life of a nomadic community living on the margins of contemporary Europe. Rather than approaching its subjects from the outside, the film takes the time to stay close, physically and emotionally, to a group for whom “family” is not primarily a matter of bloodline, but a chosen bond, built through shared survival, loyalty, and a collective way of inhabiting the world.

At the centre of the film are Pia and Zinzin, two young seasonal workers whose trajectories are marked by rupture and reinvention. Through them, the documentary explores what it means to step away from the conventional promises of stability and social integration, and what replaces those structures when you decide to live differently. The forest becomes both shelter and boundary, a space where everyday gestures like eating, resting, repairing or moving on are loaded with the weight of necessity and the desire for autonomy. The community’s internal codes, its solidarities and tensions, form a living portrait of a “large family” that is simultaneously refuge, identity, and constraint.

This is a film about freedom, but never as a slogan. It shows freedom as a complex negotiation, the exhilaration of refusing norms and the cost of precariousness, the intensity of belonging and the fragility that comes with it, the promise of collective warmth and the shadows that sometimes accompany life at the edge. The documentary’s strength lies in its ability to hold these contradictions without simplifying them, inviting the viewer to remain inside the ambiguity rather than resolve it into a thesis.

My musical work for “La Grande Famille” was conceived to serve that immersive perspective, not to explain the images but to accompany their psychological and sensory texture. The score moves with the film’s shifts between intimacy and exposure, calm and agitation, grounded routine and nocturnal excess. It was important to me that the music and sound design could resonate with the film’s central tension, between the search for a place to breathe and the risk of losing oneself in the very spaces that feel like liberation, while respecting the documentary’s closeness to real lives, real people and real bonds.

Credits :

Direction : Nuno Beirão Vieira & João Pedro Marnoto

Production : Mathieu Mallaise | Orphik Visuals & MediaUtopia

D.O.P & Photography : João Pedro Marnoto

Editing : João Pedro Marnoto & Tiago Carvalho

Text : Nuno Beirão Vieira

Sound : Nuno Beirão Vieira & João Pedro Marnoto

Soud Mixing : Duarte Ferreira

Music : TheGoldenAura

With the Support from the Champagne-Ardenne Region