Girlhood

Céline Sciamma opened the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2014 with her third feature, cast almost entirely from an open call in the Paris suburbs. Karidja Touré, Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh and Mariétou Touré had not acted before; the film is built around them with the confidence of a director who knew exactly what she had found.

Marieme's story is told in four movements, each announced by a cut to black, as she moves between the family flat she is expected to run, the school that has quietly written her off, and the group of girls who offer her something else. Crystel Fournier shoots the estate in blue and the girls in colour. The sequence in a hotel room to Rihanna's Diamonds — four minutes, uncut, sung in full — became the film's signature, and remains one of the great uses of a pop song in European cinema.

Debate in France about who gets to tell these stories followed the film everywhere, and Sciamma engaged with it directly rather than around it. Nearly a decade on, with Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Petite Maman behind her, it reads as the hinge of her career: the last of the childhood films and the first where the politics of looking are fully worked out.