The Little Sister

Hafsia Herzi has spent two decades as one of French cinema's most recognisable actresses — she was seventeen herself when The Secret of the Grain made her a César winner — and her third film as director took her into the Cannes competition in 2025. It adapts Fatima Daas's 2020 autofiction La Petite Dernière, a novel written in short, declarative sections about being the youngest daughter, French, Algerian, Muslim and gay at the same time.

Nadia Melliti, cast from an open call and acting for the first time, plays Fatima as a seventeen-year-old commuting between her family in the banlieue and a philosophy course in Paris. Herzi shoots close and patiently, mostly at Fatima's eye level, and refuses the two films this material usually becomes: neither an indictment of the family nor a triumphal coming-out. The register is closer to observation, with long stretches where nothing is announced.

Melliti won Best Actress at Cannes for it, and the film took the Queer Palm; she went on to the César and the Lumière for Best Female Revelation, with the film nominated for seven Césars in total. Reviews were warm — 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, 71 on Metacritic — and mostly agreed on the same point: the restraint is the achievement.