Cuties is a 2020 French coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré in her feature directorial debut. The plot revolves around a Senegalese-French girl with a traditional Muslim upbringing who is caught between traditional values and Internet culture. The filmmakers claimed that it is intended to criticise the hypersexualisation of pre-adolescent girls. The film premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival on 23 January.
About Cuties in brief
Cuties is a 2020 French coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré in her feature directorial debut. The plot revolves around a Senegalese-French girl with a traditional Muslim upbringing who is caught between traditional values and Internet culture. The filmmakers claimed that it is intended to criticise the hypersexualisation of pre-adolescent girls. The film premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival on 23 January. It was released in France on 19 August by BAC Films and internationally on 9 September on Netflix. While receiving generally positive reviews from critics, the film became a subject of controversy, starting from Netflix’s poster of the film. Following heavy criticism online, the Turkish Radio and Television Supreme Council requested that Netflix remove the film, and Netflix was indicted in the United States for allegedly streaming child pornography. Approximately 650 girls auditioned for the main character, 11-year-old Fathia Youssouf. Filming took place in various locations around France over a period of three months. The script eventually won Sundance’s Global Filmmaking Award in 2017, and won around sixty awards in several international film festivals. The main character Amy is fascinated by her disobedient neighbour Angelica’s twerking clique, \”Cuties\”, which is in stark contrast to Mariam’s religious customs. Amy is determined to dance with them, and sneaks out of the house, so the Cuties have no choice but to allow her to Dance with them.
The highly suggestive dance routine shocks the audience, and Amy bursts into tears and leaves before their performance ends. Amy’s mother intervenes by telling her to leave her daughter alone and then hugs her to reassure her. Amy then abandons both the traditional wedding dress and her sexy dancer’s outfit, and, in jeans and a T-shirt, her hair down, she goes out to play jump rope with a group of girls. She is also bored with salah and Islamic culture in general that her aunt seeks to impress on her. She says that the contrast of the dancing and the traditional garb of the families in the audience was fascinating. She also based it on her own experience as a refugee girl into account. She said she said she created a climate of trust between children and herself during filming. At their age, they’ve seen this kind of dance days and days with telephone images on social media, so we were also lucky that these girls’ parents were also activists, so they were also on the same side of these days as we were. The film took nearly six months to film, with the girls auditioning for the role of Amy on various locations in France and Senegal. The final cast included Médina El Aidi-Azouni, Esther Gohourou, Ilanah Cami-Goursolas and MaïMouna Gueye. The movie was selected and premiered in over two hundred film festivals, including Sundance.
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This page is based on the article Cuties published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 19, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
