Families of curves with Higgs field of arbitrarily large kernel

In this article, we consider the flat bundle (Formula presented.) and the kernel (Formula presented.) of the Higgs field naturally associated to any (polarized) variation of Hodge structures of weight 1. We study how strict the inclusion (Formula presented.) can be in the geometric case. More precisely, for any smooth projective curve (Formula presented.) of genus (Formula presented.) and any (Formula presented.), we construct non-isotrivial deformations of (Formula presented.) over a quasi-projective base such that (Formula presented.) and (Formula presented.).