The Little Sister drew big applause at the Cannes Film Festival. The audience gave writer-director Hafsia Herzi‘s coming-out pic an energetic 12-minute ovation after its world premiere Friday at the Palais.
There were lots of whoops and shouts from the crowd before Herzi’s post-screening thank-you speech as people showed their enthusiasm for the French director’s third feature aka La Petite Dernière.
The film starring Nadia Melliti is adapted from Fatima Daas’s semi-autobiographical 2022 novel The Last One, the story of a young gay Muslim woman’s sexual awakening. In his Deadline review, Damon Wise wrote, “Herzi confidently takes what could have been a traditional coming-out tale and turns it into something altogether more defiant, a character study that takes place in the no-man’s-land between the oppressive certainties of childhood and the intoxicating freedoms of early adulthood.”
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Here’s the logline: Fatima, 17, is the youngest. She lives in the suburbs with her sisters, in a happy and loving family. A good student, she joins a philosophy school in Paris and discovers a whole new world. As she begins her life as a young woman, she emancipates herself from her family and its traditions. Fatima then begins to question her identity. How can she reconcile her faith with her budding desires?
Park Ji-min, Amina Ben Mohamed, Rita Benmannana, Melissa Guers also star in The Little Sister, which MK2 Films is shopping on the Riviera.
