The little sister

Adapted from Fatima Daas' semi-autobiographical novel, The Little Sister recounts a year and a few changes in the life of Fatima, the youngest daughter of a Franco-Algerian family, as she transitions from high school to university and from instinctive denial to a timid and discreet acceptance of her homosexuality. The premise is familiar, but its treatment is not. Rather than provoking a collision between faith, family, and sexuality, Hafsia Herzi observes the micro-adjustments—from season to season, room to room, glance to glance—through which a teenager attempts to reconcile aspects of herself that the outside world insists on viewing as incompatible. The film opens with ablutions at dawn and hardly raises its tone thereafter; its argument is that perseverance can be as radical as rupture.

This restraint would be purely decorative without a center of gravity, and Nadia Melliti offers one of those first appearances that seem to have been imported from real life into the competition. She embodies Fatima with a kind of cautious permeability: an impassive face that reveals flashes of curiosity, a bulldog temperament that only manifests itself when a classmate uses the word lesbian as a weapon. An anecdote at the beginning of the film, fleeting, almost overlooked, reveals the film's method. An altercation in the playground escalates into a fight, and Fatima's fury is so out of step with the moment that it suddenly seems revealing. Later, in a lovely domestic gesture, her mother frames her diploma next to those of her sisters and cries; Fatima's face, as she accepts the embrace, does not reflect the emotion, but we sense something unlocking. Hafsia Herzi continues to trust in these small revelations: the Pride march later on, filmed not as a political climax, but as a walk with someone you love; a date where you eat noodles, which feels like a private joke between two people who are still learning to be themselves in front of each other.

Fatima's entry into queer Paris is sketched with the curiosity of a reporter and the caution of a beginner. On dating apps, she tries out different pseudonyms as she adjusts her cap, testing the distance she needs between the life she leads and the one she dreams of. An impromptu conversation at a car window with an older woman, played with seductive pedagogy by Sophie Garagnon, is both disarming and instructive, reminding us impertinently that knowledge often precedes trust. The cute encounter with Ji-Na, a nurse she recognizes from an asthma clinic, is pure cinema: hands brushing in a sterile hallway, a shared exhalation after a panic attack that unexpectedly becomes a pact. Park Ji-min embodies Ji-Na as a ray of sunshine behind a cloud: open, generous, then, without warning, withdrawn. When her depression sets in, the breakup is not staged as a betrayal, but as the first adult lesson that other people's storms are not yours. The text message that ruins an evening, the next morning that fails to restore balance: these are notes that the film plays without melodrama and that remain suspended precisely because they are not emphasized.

There are nods to the film: a kiss that tips over into the euphoria of a street demonstration, an appearance in a lesbian bar that also serves as a knowing nod to local viewers. But if Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Color is the elephant in the room, Hafsia Herzi doesn't fight it so much as she rearranges the furniture around it. The gaze here is corrective without being judgmental, erotic without being extractive, attentive to the performers' limits and the banalities that make sex seem like a part of life rather than an artificial element. This correction extends to faith. A scene with an imam, played with elusive gentleness by Abdelali Mamoun, is rightly disturbing: a casual hierarchy of sins, a theology of exceptions that seems almost compassionate until one understands its structure. Fatima leaves without revelation, and that is the whole point. The film's courage lies in allowing indecision to remain.

Formally, the work is meticulously modest. Jérémie Attard's camera favors close-ups that capture microclimates—the sting behind a joke, the breath before a confession—without suffocating the frame. The palette changes with the seasons, not as a concept but as a climate; spring is restless, summer becomes more airy and public, autumn is reduced to student rooms and bus windows, winter resembles a sustained note. Amine Bouhafa's music is sober and contrapuntal, a cello line that resists the temptation to amplify itself, moving the scenes forward while leaving their emotional charge to the faces and silences. Géraldine Mangenot's editing glides between interiors and exteriors, between the public spectacle of queer spaces and the private rituals of prayer and family, with a rhythm that honors the way transitions occur off-screen before being admitted to the screen. Even the sex scenes obey the film's ethic: direct, sometimes funny, and attentive to the awkward choreography of first times.

If there is a limitation, it is intentional: the Little Sister of the title remains, by design, partially hidden. We glimpse the sisters' teasing and the inertia of the father, glued to the television, but Hafsia Herzi refuses to stage the lyrical confrontation that so many coming-out films resort to. When Fatima and her mother—played with oceanic warmth by Amina Ben Mohamed—finally address the unspoken, the conversation stops before the declaration and still resembles a pact. The film believes in the progressive politics of kitchens: a diploma hung up, a whispered warning, tacit permission granted with a glance. Elsewhere, at university, Fatima adopts a new tribe, including Cassandra, played by Mouna Soualem, a joyful sower of chaos. The film captures the contradictory joy of this period when identity seems both chosen and provisional. One evening, she is the novice guided into a threesome with laughter as her safety net; the next morning, she is back at the mosque, washing her hands in the same way as in the opening shot. Repetition does not cancel out change, it frames it.

It is no coincidence that Nadia Melliti left the festival with the Best Actress award and the film with the Queer Palm. These awards confirm what the film already demonstrates: an instinct for the ordinary that, in two hours, becomes quietly ecstatic. It also reflects Hafsia Herzi's trajectory, from Critics' Week to Un Certain Regard to the Competition, less as a victory than as a refinement. The choices here are often conservative in the best sense of the word: the camera listens; scenes end a little earlier than expected; the catharsis we expect to see never comes when we want it to. One could say that the film sometimes plays it safe, that a more abrasive edit could have brought out the family dynamics more. But that would be to miss the point of the gamble that was taken: that the fundamental truth of a life built on small permissions—self-granted or not—will survive any discourse or key scene.

Technically, the work is never ostentatious, but it is precise. Look at how Jérémie Attard lingers on Nadia Melliti during the philosophy class on Étienne de La Boétie and voluntary servitude; the camera lets the idea bounce off her face without telling you where it lands. Or consider how Géraldine Mangenot intersperses a pride march with a later, more solitary subway ride, so that the same body occupies opposite temperatures of the same city. Even Amine Bouhafa's music contributes to the film's refusal to put everything in order: strings that refuse to resolve, pieces that stop in the middle of a phrase as if to say “not yet.” The cumulative effect is less a thesis than a diary that you are allowed to read over an entire year, guessing at the passages that were too difficult to write.

And then there's the graceful final note—no spoilers, just a gesture that refers to an athletic skill sown along the way and blossoming into a wordless statement of self-control. This is where Hafsia Herzi's work comes into its own: a character study that risks seeming lighthearted scene after scene, but which takes on significance thanks to its fidelity to the texture of lived experience. We leave the theater thinking not about victory or defeat, but about weather systems: how a person learns to predict the weather, to dress for the rain, to go out anyway. The film La petite dernière does not seek to make headlines; it is interested in life after death, in the way a film stays with you after the credits have rolled, in the way a young woman's first experiences, with their bruises and all, begin to resemble a useful past. It is there, in its discretion, that its defiance lies.

The Little Sister (La Petite Dernière)
Written and directed by Hafsia Herzi
Based on The Last One by Fatima Daas
Produced by Julie Billy, Naomi Denamur
Starring  Nadia Melliti, Park Ji-min, Amina Ben Mohamed, Rita Benmannana, Melissa Guers
Cinematography : Jérémie Attard
Edited by Géraldine Mangenot
Music by Amine Bouhafa
Production companies : June Films, Katuh Studio, Arte France Cinéma, ZDF/ARTE, MK Productions, MK2 Films
Distributed by Ad Vitam (France)
Release dates : 16 May 2025 (Cannes), 22 October 2025 (France)
Running time : 106 minutes

Seen on October 20, 2025 at the Cinematheque

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