Joseph manages a boxing club in a small suburban city while, at the same time, training his daughter and niece for the French championships. Boxing is everything for this threesome, their lives consumed by their passion for the sport – a passion that Theresa, Joseph’s wife, ends up detesting. The defeat of one of the two girls throws the survival of the club into peril and shatters the family’s equilibrium. Between the two young women, Angie and Sandra, raised as if sisters, a dangerous rivalry begins to fester, both inside and outside of the ring. Director Richard-Serrano drew on her own personal experiences to make Dans les cordes. Her grandfather was a boxer who ran a boxing club, her mother was one of the first female boxers in France and Richard-Serrano herself has twice been crowned the French women’s boxing champion. Shot in her hometown of Vitry-sur- Seine, Dans les cordes captures with warmth and honesty the struggle of a working-class family for whom boxing is everything.