Love, life and the beauty of unexpected friendships

Based freely on the best-selling novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, The Hedgehog is a heart-warming story about love, life and the beauty of unexpected friendships. Rene (Josiane Balasko) is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building; reliable, gruff and totally uncultured, she conforms to expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this prickly faade lies the real Rene, a woman passionate about literature and the arts, and in many ways more knowledgeable than her outwardly successful but emotionally vapid employers. Meanwhile, several floors up, precocious eleven-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future that seems laid out before her. In an effort to show how absurd her life is, she takes up an old camera to film the people around her?her parents, her teenage sister and even their building's grumpy concierge. But little do either Paloma or Rene know that their lives will change forever with the arrival of an elegant and enigmatic new neighbour, Mr Ozu...