Cuties

Cuties (2020)

Mignonnes

Amy, an 11-year-old girl, joins a group of dancers named “the cuties” at school, and rapidly grows aware of her burgeoning femininity—upsetting her mother and her values in the process.

Date of release
2020-08-19
TMDB
5.1 / 10 (490)
Runtime
1h 36m
Genres
Drama
Director
Maïmouna Doucouré

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: Sundance World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic

Cuties is a 2020 French coming-of-age drama film written and directed by Maïmouna Doucouré in her feature directorial debut. The film's ensemble cast is led by Fathia Youssouf who portrays Amy, a Senegalese-French girl with a traditional Muslim upbringing who is caught between traditional Muslim values and Internet culture when she joins a twerking dance crew.

Production

The film was announced by filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré as her feature debut directorial venture. She rose to prominence with her 2016 short film Maman(s), which was selected and premiered in over two hundred film festivals, and won around sixty awards in several international film festivals.

Doucouré penned the script for Cuties, taking her life experience as a refugee girl into account. The script eventually won Sundance's Global Filmmaking Award in 2017. Doucouré says her inspiration for the film was a talent show in Paris that she happened to see. She says that the contrast of the dancing and the traditional garb of the families in the audience was fascinating.

Doucouré spent nearly 18 months researching studies on how young and pre-teen children are being exposed to adult content and sexualised images on social media in order to showcase the accurate reality in the film. She spoke to many young girls about these issues. She says that the film deals with self-image and social media. "Our girls see that the more a woman is overly sexualised on social media, the more she is successful.

Casting for the film took nearly six months. Approximately 650 girls auditioned for the main character Amy; ultimately, 11-year-old Fathia Youssouf was chosen. Principal photography took place in various locations around France over a period of three months. Doucouré said she "created a climate of trust" between the young actors and herself during filming.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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