Les Mistons
1957 film by François Truffaut

Les Mistons (The Mischief Makers) is a French short film written and directed by François Truffaut in 1957. It was his second film after Une Visite in 1955 but it is considered his "first short film of any real consequence". Truffaut simply called it "my first real film". Moreover, it was Bernadette Lafont's film debut. She was at that time Gérard Blain's wife. The film demonstrates already some examples for Truffaut's "trademark tracking shots" and would "help define his style" as well as "set Truffaut on a path for his career". Truffaut's narrative stresses the details of life, hereby establishing one of the traits of the French New Wave. Thus he also became a predecessor of French film directors such as Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie). It has been stated that the formation of the French New Wave could be "tracked through two short films": Jean-Luc Godard's All the Boys Are Called Patrick and Truffaut's Les Mistons. In 2013 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City screened this film together with Truffaut's The 400 Blows.
“Les Mistons” enters the record as 1957 film by François Truffaut. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mistons, film and François can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q741105. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1955 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Les Mistons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.