Maleaume Paquin, the boy who plays Rémi enfant, is the fifteenth child Antoine Blossier met during the casting. In all, the director saw close to four hundred other children before deciding.
The sequence of the storm in England was shot in the studio for three days. It was a complicated scene to settle.
Darkness, the Border Collie who plays Capi, is a true circus dog: he is used to doing the numbers he performs in the film in street performances and has a strong complicity with his master.
Rémi sans famille is adapted from Hector Malot's novel "Sans famille" (published for the first time in 1878), which focuses on an abandoned child (Rémi) sold by his adoptive parents to a traveling musician (Vitalis). At his side, he will learn the rough life of acrobat and sing to earn his bread. Accompanied by the faithful dog Capi and the little monkey Joli-Coeur, his long journey through France, made of meetings, friendships and mutual aid, leads him to the secret of his origins ...
The two-volume book has been adapted several times to the cinema: No family (Sans famille) of Marc Allégret in 1934 or No family (Sans famille) of André Michel in 1958. On television, the best-known adaptation is undoubtedly the Japanese animated series Rémi sans family, including 51 episodes of 24 minutes and broadcast in France for the first time in 1982 on TF1.
"Without family (Sans famille)", which was first written in the form of a weekly soap opera, takes place over four years. It was thus impossible for Antoine Blossier to keep all the events and the stakes. The filmmaker has therefore reduced the story to one year, wanting to adapt what constitutes a chronicle to a more classic scenario in three acts in his dramaturgy.