Rite Of Passage

ANNES Film Festival can often turn out to be an auspicious journey to belongingness for filmmakers.

- NAMRATA JOSHI

ANNES Film Festival can often turn out to be an auspicious journey to belongingness for filmmakers. Like it has been for the French actor-filmmaker Hafsia Harzi of Tunisian-Algerian descent. She started off in 2019 at the parallel Critic's Week segment with her debut feature film You Deserve A Lover. Her sophomore film Good Mother played in the official Un Certain Regard section in 2021 and bagged an ensemble award. This year she comes full circle with her France-Germany co-production La Petite Derniere (The Little Sister) having premiered in the festival's main competition section.

Based on Fatima Daas's auto fictional novel, The Last One, the film tries to seamlessly bring together two often seen narrative threads in cinema — that of immigrant reality and queer identity issues. However, the former remains more of a backdrop and context to help take a deep dive into the latter.

In keeping with its title, the film is centered on the teen-aged Fatima (Nadia Melliti), the youngest of the three daughters of Algerian immigrants in Paris. Happy in the folds of a warm and caring family, enjoying her time with friends and devout in her faith, she nonetheless finds herself slowly getting torn apart as she grapples with her identity and desires —her growing attraction and affection for women.