In the early 1980s, Rose moves from Abidjan to Paris with her two sons Jean and Ernest. Between independence, wage work, heartbreak, and the task as a single parent to ensure attention and care for her children, clefts break open, which she disappears into time and again. UN PETIT FRÈRE tells a compassionate story of a family spanning two decades. Time jumps and changes of perspective across various stages of life elucidate the volatile relationship between the three protagonists. Their experiences are layered over each other, sketching a somewhat dissonant picture of their complex, shared world of experience. Touching narrative gestures trace the entanglements of growing up, living together, and drifting apart; being close and distant in a confined space between the metropolis of Paris and the port city of Rouen in Normandy, France. Subjective strategies to cope with and shape everyday life, to chart a future and strive for a sense of kinship and intimacy. A trio that reinvents forms of community in constant change.