My Brother’s Band: Uniting through music, family and unbreakable bonds

In French, the title is En Fanfare. The English title is The Marching Band. But the Australian title is My Brother’s Band.

That’s the one its director, Emmanuel Courcol, believes best encapsulates his film.

My Brother’s Band is a crowd pleaser, an earnest family story that will bring an audience together to appreciate that the bonds which unite us are much stronger than our divisions.

The brothers in question are Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) and Jimmy (Pierre Lottin). Separated as children, Thibaut and Jimmy weren’t aware of each other’s existence until Thibaut is diagnosed with leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant.

That’s when it all comes out – he’s adopted.

Thibaut is a successful and famous conductor who lives his life in and out of elite performance institutions all over the world with Paris as his base. He grew up with money and privilege.

Jimmy did not. He was taken in by a working class woman and he plays the trombone in a brass band in a small town near Lille, in the north of France. The town has hit hard times with the closure of its main employer.

Courcol and his team filmed many of the scenes in an area called Lallaing, near the border with Belgium and not far from Lille. It was the first place he and co-writer Irene Muscari went to, and they found exactly what they were looking for.

“The environment, the band and the people all in one place, it was amazing,” he told The Nightly. “We drank a beer together, and then we spent a lot of time in the north, and that was a really important time.”

Courcol wanted to set most of the story in a town like Lallaing and to capture a different side of France that international visitors may not see. “It was chosen very specifically for the socioeconomic difference, and the contrast of Paris and the regions is very clear.

“I wanted the brothers to have that difference – one who’s in the world of Paris and international travel and one who’s in this lower socioeconomic region. It was described as a meeting of two planets coming together.”

What binds them besides a heretofore undiscovered family history is also the role music plays in their lives, and the way instruments and people work together to make something beautiful.

Growing up, Courcol had brothers and one of them played the trumpet in the bedroom next to him. Brass music has always been a really big part of his life. He’s always had a soft spot for marching bands.

Members of Lallaing’s real-life brass band ended up featuring in the film, and were also invited by Courcol to attend the ritzy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival at the other end of the country.

They walked the red carpet, and at end of the film screening, they played a piece of music heard in the film. It was life imitating art.

“It was a really unexpected adventure for all of them. It was very much a meeting of worlds, and in this instance, you have the elite of cinema, much like (the scene) at the end of the film.”

The story is centred on the brothers, they are the emotional core of the world, but their relationship also represents optimism for a wider coming together. What Courcol found in the north are normal lives not anthropologically that different from his own.

He also learnt that the cliches about the north being warm and welcoming was true.

“It’s actually very real, and I experienced that very much,” he said. “It’s just them, it’s the way they are in their day-to-day life. We filmed (My Brother’s Band) in 2023 and we are still in contact, we’re still friends, it’s very easy.”

The dynamics of the relationship between the production and the town are reflected in the film itself, which has that earnest, heart-warming and simple charm that has made it a hit.

“It’s been a big success in France and around the world because there is this need for reconciliation, and we are living in such a fractured world with opposing views,” Courcol said.

“This idea is that everyone can reunite in a musical moment. It’s not a fairy tale but it does show, at the end, an almost utopia of how we could be, of how we could sing together, and this idea of brotherhood.”

My Brother’s Band is in cinemas on Boxing Day