Thoughts on The Little Sister

   On Criterion, I watched The Little Sister, a 2025 French coming-of-age drama written and directed by Hasfia Herzi, adapted from Fatima Daas' autobiographical novel The Last One. The film stars Nadia Melliti in her debut screen acting role as Fatima, a 17-year old French-Algerian girl living with her family in Paris, and is the youngest of three daughters. She is athletic and plays soccer, and her sisters chastise her for not helping out more with cooking. She goes to university, and is struggling with exploring her sexuality as a lesbian, keeping it a secret from her family and meeting women at clubs and through dating apps, using fake names and backstories, like saying she has seven brothers. Her peers know she's queer, though she denies it and even joins in on the mocking of a gay student, despite him calling her out for being a lesbian afterwards.

    She has asthma, and her pulmonologist has her attend a seminar to learn how to improve her breathing, and she meets the assistant to the doctor, Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min), who is French-Korean, and is also secretly queer. She and Fatima can sense that the other is a lesbian, and they begin a romance, bonding over being the children of immigrant parents who learned French as a second language, and being queer women. Their romance comes to an abrupt end when Ji-Na reveals she struggles with severe depression, and pulls away from Fatima out of shame and guilt, leaving Fatima to feel lost and confused, and exploring more femme queer communities to understand herself better. She also has trouble reconciling her Muslim faith with her lesbian identity, and visiting an imam to ask advice about a "friend" only leaves her with feeling shamed for being homosexual.

    I really liked this movie. It's an interesting drama that focuses on a Muslim queer girl figuring out her identity, and portraying more of the LGBTQ culture of Paris, with queer dance clubs and pride marches and chants for trans rights. Melliti gives a very sensitive performance as the quiet yet headstrong Fatima, who is blunt when she needs to be while clearly apprehensive in early dates with women, and Park gives an introspective performance as Ji-Na, struggling with feeling like an outsider because of her sexuality, race, and mental health issues. There's a very personal and intimate feel to this movie which I got into, being inside of this world of French queer life. I agree with the consensus that this film is restrained yet powerful.