Parallel to his filmmaking, Honoré has maintained an active career as an author of books for children, young adults and families. (His most recent film, Les malheurs de Sophie [2015], is for children.) Fittingly then, his first feature film is an adaptation, made for French television, of one such novel. Ten-year-old Pascal overhears a family discussion in which beloved older brother Léo reveals that he is HIV-positive, only to have his parents declare that the news must be kept from the family’s youngest member. Unlike an American “afterschool special,” the focus is not the family’s struggle with homophobia but rather on Pascal’s wrestling with the knowledge that he is supposed not to have and, therefore, cannot discuss. Close to Leo is a very straightforward, even simple film, but one about a complex subject: the awakening of a preadolescent consciousness of death. The film anticipates the importance of family—and of rethinking the family—in Honoré’s subsequent work.
