"To be more feminine". This is the advice, given three times over, by a boyfriend, a sister and an imam, to the protagonist of The Little Sister [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] by Hafsia Herzi, unveiled in competition at the 78th Cannes Film Festival. But for Fatima, who is just starting her philosophy studies at university, and thus exploring “all the questions that human beings ask about themselves and society”, these injunctions relating to appearances are only the tree hiding the forest of her profound nature. By adapting the eponymous novel by Fatima Daas, the French filmmaker has indeed measured herself up against, and with great precision, a topic at once simple and complicated: that of a young woman discovering she prefers women and leading a burdensome secret life out of respect for and dependence on the values of her religion and her loving but traditional family.

From one spring to the next, from graduation to the effervescence of student parties, Fatima (the revelation Nadia Melliti) goes through five seasons of intimate initiation and interrogation, she who loves sports (she plays football), music and reading, and whose grades give great pride to her mother, a woman always in the kitchen with her two eldest daughters by her side while the father stays on the couch or goes out to play dominos with a friend. And yet, this union has been working well this way for 30 years and there is a positive atmosphere in this apartment on the outskirts of Paris. By contrast, for Fatima, the best friend to the most braggadocious boys in her high school class, the internal tension is getting ever stronger and flammable, with her boyfriend starting to talk about marriage and children. Signing up for a dating website for women, she cautiously takes the plunge, under false identities, getting used to the nighttime atmosphere. Then love appears one day, in the shape of Ji-Na (Park Jin-Min), a nurse. Will this passion survive the summer? Will Fatima rebel by managing to openly (“who would want to marry you?”) own her sexual identity? And how can she reconcile her faith with these changes? A vast and acrobatic programme for a young person…

Finding the right rhythm, a beautiful diversity of narrative colours and intelligent background ingredients, all without any forcing, Hafsia Herzi weaves a romantic film (“One must live. A broken heart? I’ll sew it up for you.”) under the surface of the fragmented portrait of a community asserting its specificity (“1, 2, 3, long live lesbians!”). Softly capturing emotions with close-ups on faces, the director also knows how to film bodies in flames (without excess) and balance energetic group sequences with the silences of key moments, while expressing a lot without too many words and juggling with ease, and with her own words, on the human in its simple and essential dimensions.

The Little Sister was produced by French outfit June Films and co-produced by Arte France Cinéma and by German company Katuh Studio. mk2 Films is handling international sales.