La petite dernière

French actress Hafsia Herzi was perhaps best known for her collaborations with Abdellatif Kechiche (LA GRAINE ET LE MULET, 2007) before staking her claim as one of the country’s most sensitive new filmmakers with BONNE MÈRE (2021). With this film, she proved herself to be an adept director of actors and a gifted chronicler of the lives of French Muslims with North African roots. Her latest work LA PETITE DERNIÈRE—an adaptation of the bestseller by Fatima Daas—follows roughly two years in the life of an intensely repressed French-Algerian teenager struggling to reconcile her lesbian identity with her religious upbringing and her family’s heteronormative expectations. In contrast to the lengthy, graphic sex scenes of Kechiche’s LA VIE D’ADÈLE (2013), Herzi’s take on sapphic sexuality is subtle and elegantly drawn to echo its protagonist’s ambivalent journey through high school and college— and the psychic turmoil of her first great love. Boasting poignant performances by newcomer Nadia Melliti (who won the prize for Best Actress at Cannes) and Park Ji-min, LA PETITE DERNIÈRE is a rare coming-of-age film that understands personal growth not as a linear experience but as a perpetual back and forth between desire and fear. (Beatrice Loayza)

In the presence of Nadia Melliti.

Hafsia Herzi: TU MÉRITES UN AMOUR (2019), BONNE MÈRE (2021)