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| Rita Benmannana, Melissa Guers, and Nadia Melliti in The Little Sister |
Cast: Nadia Melliti, Park Ji-min, Amina Ben Mohamed, Melissa Guers, Rita Benmannana, Rizzak Ridha, Louis Memmi, Waniss Chaouki, Anouar Kardellas, Joven Etienne, Madi Dembele, Mahamadou Sacko. Screenplay: Hafsia Herzi, based on a novel by Fatima Daas. Cinematography: Jérémie Attard. Production design: Dièné Béreté. Film editing: Géraldine Mangenot. Music: Amine Bouhafa.
In The Little Sister Hafsia Herzi succeeds in taking an almost too familiar coming-of-age story and giving it freshness and universality. Seventeen-year-old Fatima (Nadia Melliiti) is athletic and likes to hang out with the boys more than the girls, but she has a boyfriend who wants to get married as soon as she finishes school. She's afraid of breaking with her traditional French-Algerian family if she acknowledges that she's sexually more attracted to women than to men. She explores lesbianism furtively by hiring a prostitute to educate her on what women do sexually with other women. She's also asthmatic, and during a treatment she strikes sparks with a nurse, Ji-Na (Park Ji-min), and they begin an affair. When she starts university, she finds a thriving gay community and joins it, a little warily, still fearing that she'll be exposed to her family. A breakup with Ji-Na sends her into a tailspin, and she seeks help from an imam at a mosque, but he gives her the conservative religious line about her sexuality that a rabbi might give a Jew, a priest might give a Catholic, or a minister might give a Protestant. In the end, she is left to find a way of being herself rather than what her family, her society, or her religion say she should be. The film gets much of its strength from its cast, some of whom are non-professional actors, and from an insightful screenplay based on the autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas. The Little Sister tells us nothing new, but like the best old stories, it's anchored deeply in the truth about humanity and sexuality.
