A traveling puppet show is the whole world for one family in "The Plough," Philippe Garrel's 2023 drama about what gets carried forward when a parent is gone.
What is The Plough about?
Three siblings, their father, and their grandmother have built a life around a puppet theatre that moves from town to town, setting up and striking the same small stage night after night. The father's sudden death leaves the family without its center, and without the one person who held the troupe together on paper and in practice. What follows is less a plot than a slow reckoning: who keeps performing, who wants out, and whether a craft passed down through a family can survive the loss of the person who taught it. Garrel, working here with his own children in the cast, frames the puppet show itself as a kind of inheritance — fragile, repetitive, and worth protecting anyway.
About the cast
Louis Garrel and Esther Garrel lead an ensemble that also includes Aurélien Recoing, Léna Garrel, Damien Mongin, Francine Bergé, Mathilde Weil, and Asma Messaoudene, several of them members of the director's own family playing a family on screen.
Context & significance
The film comes from France and Switzerland and runs 96 minutes, a compact frame for a story that unfolds mostly in the pauses between shows rather than in big dramatic turns. It sits in the tradition of French family dramas that treat manual, unglamorous work — here, puppetry — as a serious subject in its own right.
Watching The Plough on Ktime
"The Plough" is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so Farsi-speaking viewers can follow it either way. Watching requires a free K-Time account login; the film's page itself is open to read without one, and the whole experience is built around a Farsi-first interface for the diaspora audience.