Divines

Houda Benyamina's Divines won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2016 — the festival prize for best first feature, awarded across all sections — and the César for Best First Feature in 2017. The film became one of the most internationally consequential French debut features of its decade, with Benyamina's acceptance speech at Cannes (a fierce, profanity-rich address about the under-representation of working-class North-African-French women in French cinema) becoming a small event in itself.

On the outskirts of Paris, teenage Dounia (Oulaya Amamra, the director's sister) trades the classroom for the street, apprenticing herself to the neighbourhood-mafia woman Rebecca in pursuit of money, power and a way out of her family's housing-estate trajectory. Her best friend Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena, in the supporting performance that won her the César for Best Supporting Actress) accompanies her into the trade. Kévin Mischel plays a young dancer at a rehearsal hall whose physical practice and kindness become a counterweight in Dounia's rapidly accelerating life.

Julien Poupard's photography of the Pierrefitte-sur-Seine and Bobigny housing estates, the rehearsal-studio sequences, and Demi Evans and Damso's hip-hop soundtrack produced a distinctive register that has been widely influential on subsequent French banlieue cinema. The film's commitment to female friendship at its centre — without sentimentalising it — set Divines apart from the predominantly-male tradition of French banlieue film descending from La Haine.