Petite Maman (Little Mother) is a 2021 French fantasy family drama film written and directed by Céline Sciamma.

Starring twins Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz with Stéphane Varupenne, Nina Meurisse, and Margo Abascal.

Eight-year-old Nelly has a maternal grandmother, disabled from a hereditary disease, who has just died in her early 60s in a care home.

As Nelly says good-bye to the other residents, her mother Marion and her husband empty her room at the care home.

Marion is deeply upset by the whole process and leaves during the early hours without waking and saying goodbye to Nelly.

Going out into the woods to play, Nelly meets a girl her own age building a cabin of wind-fallen branches.

Alarmed, she picks up her clothes says good-bye and flees, relieved when she returns to the house and finds her father in the present.

Nelly learns that they are the same age and that in three days, Marion is set to have an operation to prevent her from developing the same disabling illness as her mother.

Through repeated returns to the late 1990s, Nelly is able to learn things about her mother — such as, she harbours ambitions of being an actress, by going through some improvised play-acting — and also to spend some time with her grandmother.

The website's consensus reads: "Small in narrative scope but deeply impactful, Petite Maman is a delicate, powerfully acted meditation on grief.