This tragicomic feature debut from no fewer than four co-directors casts non-actor Daniel Vannet as the hero in the story of his own life. Stocky, disheveled, illiterate and inarticulate, Willy has lived a humdrum existence; all 50 years of it with his parents in a provincial northern backwater. When his twin brother dies, Willy takes it upon himself to become a fully independent member of greater society, a journey that will take him as far and wide as the neighboring village. If Willy endures, it is not because he is extraordinary, but because he struggles so sincerely to become ordinary -- an apartment, a scooter, and some friends -- Willy wants it all. Thus begins this sweetly melancholic social misfit’s late initiation into adulthood. Along the way he encounters another Willy, a young man also living on the margins, but for very different reasons. At once cruel and sensitive, sentimental and squalid, Willy I emerges finally as a delicate rumination on otherness and social conformity.
