Actor-turned-filmmakers seem to be the highlight of the 2025 edition of Cannes, but Official Competition newcomer Hafsia Herzi — already with two feature films under her belt — clearly plays in a different league. In the literal sense, too, as the Dickinson-Johannsson-Stewart trio has been given lovely and encouraging spots in the Un Certain Regard section by Frémaux’s team. But for those unfamiliar with the festival’s inner workings, The Little Sister is one of those films that make you wonder how it made it into the Official Competition.
Adapted from Fatima Daas’ eponymous autobiographical novel La Petite Dernière, the film follows Fatima, a 17-year-old closeted French-Algerian teenager, as she navigates a process of self-discovery and comes to terms with her lesbian identity — an experience that stands in tension with her cultural upbringing and religious beliefs. While Herzi’s approach to her protagonist, combined with Nadia Melliti’s grounded performance, demonstrates emotional intelligence and sincerity, the film’s latent instrumentalization of identity politics and its occasional narrative sloppiness result in a half-baked work — a structural weakness it shares with Robin Campillo’s Enzo, which also premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight and similarly explores queer identity as a process of discovery.
We meet Fatima in the spring, as she prepares for her high school qualification exams. Usually framed in interiors tinted with dark shades of blue, her introduction to the film conveys a sense of routine that seems to both protect her and render her invisible. She does her morning prayers, goes to school, hangs out with an all-boys group — the bullying type — and plays football. A rare case of a socially accepted tomboy, it’s her hard work that compensates for her perceived lack of femininity in the eyes of her family. She also has a painstakingly courteous Muslim boyfriend who hopes to move their relationship forward in halal ways.
For Fatima, being normal serves as a form of protection — until it doesn’t. During a class argument, someone calls her a “lesbian” — the first breach that reveals something hidden, prompting her to confront parts of herself she had kept buried. That’s when she downloads a dating app and begins meeting women under false identities. Herzi is at her strongest in depicting Fatma’s “undercover” trysts, focusing above all on the ways she seeks self-expression through invented names and shifting personas. Melliti skillfully captures Fatima’s restrained curiosity and the cool butch performance that conceals her inexperience.
Yet Fatima’s interactions with her entourage — whether with her family, her friends, or during her brief nightly encounters — lack a natural flow, a casualness in their rhythm. Herzi is a filmmaker who plays it safe, avoiding risky choices. From her decisions in framing, blocking, and editing to the venues where the characters appear — one of them being La Mutinerie, the emblematic lesbian bar no French queer person could fail to recognize, also featured in Anna Cazenave Cambet’s Un Certain Regard film Love Me Tender — Herzi tries a little too hard to deliver a polished queer representation. Wanting to make a film that would prompt audiences to say, “Finally, a film that gets the lesbian coming-of-age trope right,” might sound good on paper and is a valid ambition, especially given the current state of French cinema — but this deliberateness weighs so heavily on the film that it ends up overshadowing its main character.
The most dissatisfying instance of this deliberate cautiousness comes in the relationship between Fatima and Ji-Na, the nurse she meets at a medical center where she goes for her asthma, and with whom she later goes on a date. Played by a luminous Park Ji-min, Ji-Na represents the first authentic and romantic relationship Fatima dares to pursue. The scenes of them flirting, eating and slurping noodles, having sex, hugging, and kissing each other joyfully at a Pride parade quickly turn into a game of “spot the reference” for connoisseurs. In the third act, Ji-Na suddenly announces that she no longer feels well in the relationship, leaving Fatima to silently grapple with her prematurely broken heart — turning the entire course of their relationship into a direct cinematic quotation of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color. Herzi’s recourse to these easily identifiable references stems less from a desire to disown Kechiche than from a will to rework and readjust his gaze — to show how a lesbian relationship should have been depicted instead.
The attentiveness of Herzi’s camera when filming queer, racialized bodies surely won’t go unnoticed. The Little Sister seeks to assert the female, or rather, queer gaze to every inch of its core — but it remains a gaze that is paradoxically “correctional,” dependent on what it strives to free itself from. Herzi’s latest is a counterpoint film that eats its own tail, so to speak.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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