Divines

Houda Benyamina's Divines won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes 2016, the festival's prize for the best first feature in any section, and the César for Best First Feature in 2017. Few French debuts of the decade travelled further, and Benyamina's acceptance speech at Cannes, a fierce, profane address about how rarely working-class French women of North African descent are seen in French cinema, became a small event of its own.

On the outskirts of Paris, teenage Dounia (Oulaya Amamra, the director's sister) trades the classroom for the street and apprentices herself to Rebecca, the woman who runs the neighbourhood's drug trade, in pursuit of money, power and a way off the housing-estate track her family seems fixed on. Her best friend Maimouna (Déborah Lukumuena, whose performance won her the César for Best Supporting Actress) goes into the trade with her. Kévin Mischel plays a young dancer at a rehearsal hall whose discipline and kindness become a counterweight to Dounia's fast-accelerating life.

Julien Poupard photographs the housing estates of Pierrefitte-sur-Seine and Bobigny and the rehearsal studio, and Demi Evans and Damso's hip-hop soundtrack drives the whole thing; French banlieue films since have borrowed a good deal from its look and sound. It puts a friendship between two young women at its centre and refuses to sentimentalise it, which sets Divines apart from the largely male tradition of French banlieue cinema that descends from La Haine.