Former Swiss social worker and self-taught film-maker Fred Baillif developed La Mif (the title is slang for “the fam” or family) over a period of two years with the at-risk teenage residents and care workers of a Geneva children’s home. The film’s non-professional cast play characters who, if not specifically based on themselves, are rooted in their shared stories and experiences. The result is remarkable: powered by skittering, unpredictable energy and adolescent emotional eruptions, it’s a smartly structured portrait of a de facto family unit, and the tensions that tear through it.

With projects born out of the cross-pollination between real life and fiction – other examples include Laurent Cantet’s Palme d’Or-winning The Class and Sarah Gavron’s vibrant, vital Rocks – there’s always the risk that the creative methodology turns out to be more interesting than the finished film; that good intentions are sunk by declamatory acting and issue box-ticking. Fortunately, La Mif holds up impressively, driven by performances that are, at minimum, solid, and at best genuinely exceptional. Standouts include Claudia Grob as veteran care manager Lora, returning to work after personal trauma, and Kassia Da Costa as Novinha, neglected by her mother and consumed by an emotion she can’t quite name – perhaps rage, perhaps a soul-sick sadness.

Mini-chapters focus on characters in turn, each offering a new perspective on the unfolding drama; choral and chamber music is an unexpected but effective punctuation in the storytelling, but most powerful is sound design that understands the gravity of moments of weighted silence.