People are voting emotionally.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The film starts out as an interesting pseudo-documentary about the French Child Protection Services, and it seems sort of like The Office. Unfortunately the film then drags on for another 90 minutes as it jumps from vignette to vignette (abused child, abandoned child, etc) while you get to see a massively dysfunctional arm of the police department yell and function incoherently. If I was their boss, I would've fired about half of the people in that office long before movie ended.The drama is hugely overblown in the film, but unfortunately it is not funny in any scene, even when the director tries to make it so, as when the -entire department- starts making fun of a girl who was sexually abused after her cell phone was stolen. Other ridiculous scenes (although there are so many): • Fred taking off the glasses of the (unnamed?) weirdo photographer, then letting her hair down? It's like out of some 1980s teen comedy, but done here to supremely awkward effects.• The CPS people abusing a girl who just gave a stillborn (or possibly aborted) baby a few months after being raped.• So, so, so many unexplained character interactions, e.g. between the weirdo photographer and her baby daddy. Why is he taking care of their children? Why does he seem like a child molester himself, but then this plot is never, ever developed at all? Why is she hiding from his gaze when she leaves her apartment, across the street? None of this is even remotely explained. The photographer's romance with the guy on the squad is incredibly overdone and unnecessary.• Why did they think it was a good idea to bring along someone with horrible anxiety issues to an undercover gem smuggling operation? No one was like "this girl who freaks out by saying 'hello' should probably not be playing a central role in the operation"?There are many more. I don't seem to be nitpicky, I can enjoy movies with some plot holes, but this film is an entire series of partially explained character interactions. It's the film equivalent of Lost. Stop introducing character development if you're not going anywhere with it, good lord. I get that nothing is really 'resolved' when you're working with Child Protection Services, but even that point is not gotten across very well.I've seen worse films, but would definitely not recommend this to anyone. I did not previously know that Luc Besson was a pedophile and molested this film's director when she was a girl, but it's also unfortunate that she didn't make a better story about child abuse, given her own history. C'est la vie.

Polisse is a police drama based on actual child protection unit cases in France. The visual style reminded me of the American TV show, "NYPD Blue." The acting by the ensemble cast is excellent, but the structure is unusual as it moves rapidly from the personal lives of the cops to the sometimes riveting crimes being investigated. One particular scene midway into the film, involving a homeless black woman explaining to the unit that she must leave her small son with them in order to give him a warm place to live, will tear out your heart. The start is a bit too haphazard for my taste, but I grew accustomed to the pace as it went along. A fair warning to those looking for a happy ending, with a positive message about the world we live in; forget it, this is a gritty, realistic, and sobering tale, and one that will stay with you for a long time.

Polisse was my favourite film at the recent Sydney Film Festival. A french film from writer, director, star Maiween, it tells the story of the Child Protection Unit in Paris. It was absolutely riveting from start to finish.An ensemble piece that moves at a cracking pace, it could be forgiven for not establishing character, but it actually manages to do that and do it very well. We are introduced to this group of close knit colleagues as they go about their day trying to balance the horrors they have to deal with (rapists, kidnappers, abusers, paedophiles) with their personal lives.Maiween spent quite some time with a real CPU and told us in the Q&A that all the cases she featured are just like ones she witnessed and with that experience she brought an almost documentary feel at the same time as adding creative drama and plot to moments of the story as they rush through case after case. The performances are all excellent and the editing is sublime (it won a French Oscar for this).It's shocking, emotional, intense and surprisingly very funny.Highly recommended if you like hard-hitting films that deal with serious subjects in a very human and darkly humorous way.

This French drama is set inside the Child Protection Unit of the Paris police. This is the unit that deals with crimes involving children and crimes against children, and some of the material here is supposedly based on actual cases. Actress, co-writer and director Maitwenn Le Besco has obviously thoroughly researched the background of the Unit, and she brings a documentary-like realism to the material through the use of hand held cameras, rapid cutting between scenes, overlapping story lines, and natural performances from an ensemble cast. There are some strong and unsettling moments interspersed throughout the film. Some of the characters are more fully developed than others, and this creates an uneven balance. A photojournalist (played by the director herself) is assigned to record the activities of the unit, and she becomes embedded and gets swept up in some of their activities. The members of the specialist unit seek catharsis for their stress through drink, casual sex, and inappropriate black humour. It is often demanding and draining work, as they often witness some of the worst deprivations in society, and the horrors that they deal with on a daily basis take their toll, both personally and professionally. With its mix of black humour, police procedural, tired melodrama and action, Polisse sometimes comes across like the pilot episode for a TV series about the CPU, sort of like a frenetic cross between The Wire and Law & order: SVU.