Ma vie ma gueule: Sophie Fillières’ final film starring Agnès Jaoui on Arte

My Life, My Face, the seventh and final feature by Sophie Fillières, is airing on Arte on Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 8:55 PM. Premiering as the opening title of the Quinzaine des Cinéastes 2024 just months after the director’s death, the film casts Agnès Jaoui as Barberie Bichette, nicknamed Barbie, a 55-year-old woman confronted with a deep existential crisis.

Barberie Bichette, known to her circle as Barbie, at 55 faces a growing cloud of doubts. Her divorce remains hard to swallow, her relationships with her children are strained, her job feels inconsequential, and her OCD is taking up more and more space. Between sessions with the shrink and short poems scrawled on the edges of tables, she wrestles with how to go on living with herself when everything that once seemed solid starts to falter.

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This intimate crisis lies at the heart of Ma vie ma gueule, a film whose making was inseparable from the passing of Sophie Fillières in July 2023. The filmmaker had wrapped principal photography but could not complete post-production. In accordance with her wishes, her children Agathe and Adam Bonitzer supervised the editing and finalizing of the film with her collaborators.

Our take on Ma vie ma gueule

It’s hard not to read Barberie Bichette as a mirror of Sophie Fillières, detecting the director in every corner of this touching self-portrait worn by Agnès Jaoui. Barbie may have been beautiful, may have been loved, may have been a good mother, a reliable colleague or a great lover. Today, she is above all a woman in her mid‑fifties in the throes of a crisis, grappling with loneliness, her divorce, her children and her own obsessions.

On the edge of every crisis, her desire to reclaim the spark of life is filmed with astonishing empathy and a sincere absurdity, fed by the film’s deliberate slowness and by a true sense of dialogue, at once funny and bittersweet.

Carried from start to finish by Agnès Jaoui, the film also offers invigorating supporting turns: Valérie Donzelli, Laurent Capelluto and Philippe Katerine, who merely passes through but acts as the trigger for Barbie’s awakening.

Structured in three acts with very different tonalities – a brisk comedy, a punchy tragedy, then an epiphany-laden finale – Ma vie ma gueule emerges as a final film imbued with freedom and self-recognition. A liberty Sophie Fillières herself kept until the end, asking her children, Agathe and Adam Bonitzer, to supervise the montage and post‑production with her closest collaborators.

After debuting in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in May 2024 and then hitting French cinemas on September 18, 2024, Ma vie ma gueule continues its journey on television. The final film by Sophie Fillières will be available on Arte on Wednesday, August 19, 2026 at 8:55 p.m..