The poster for the French drama, as a trailer, sparked online disapproval and a petition for Netflix to abandon it.
The award-winning drama follows an 11-year-old boy who joins a dance group. Its author says he intends to take on the challenge of sexualizing girls.
Netflix said the photo “was a true representation of the film.”
The image, along with the film’s call and suggestive dance sequences, provoked outrage on the Internet. A petition stating that “sexualizing an ONZE child over the visual arousal of paedophiles” has obtained 25,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.
But director Maimouna Doucouré explained that the story aims to highlight how social media pushes women to imitate sexualized photographs without fully understanding what hides them or the risks involved.
She said to explore the subject after being surprised to see an organization of women in their 11s dancing sensually revealing clothes.
“I saw that some very young women were followed by another 400,000 people on social media and I tried to understand why,” he told CineEuropa.
“There were no specific reasons, apart from the fact that they had posted or at least revealing photos: this is what had earned them this ‘reputation’.
“Today, the sexier and more objective a woman is, the more valuable she is to social media. And when you’re 11, you don’t perceive all those mechanisms, but you have a tendency to imitate, you do the same as the others. to get a similar result.
“It is urgent to communicate, so that a debate takes a stand on the subject.”
Cuties follows Amy, an 11-year-old girl from Senegal, who is torn between her family’s classic and conservative lifestyle and the escape presented through neighboring Angelica and her band of dancers.
He won the French-Senegal filmmaker Doucouré the award for the dramatic direction of world cinema at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
His original Mignonnes has just been released in French cinemas.
This is not an original Netflix and will hit the platform next month. Many other people on social media have criticized the performances.
After the promotional poster sparked online controversy, Netflix told BBC News, “It was not an accurate representation of the film, so the symbol and description were updated.”
Critics of Sundance films were receptive.
The Hollywood Reporter called the film “captivating but structurally fragile” and said it portrayed a “critical vision of a culture that directs impressionable women towards the hyper-xuization of their bodies.”
Screen Daily stated that “twerk’s view of the bodies of tweens is explicitly designed to surprise a mature in contemplation of the destruction of the present innocence.”
He also noted that Doucouré had created “outrageous musical montages involving close-up shots of the tween crotch making pouting.”
He added: “Doucouré turns out to need to galvanize censorship, but it fails exactly because it’s trying so hard. In the end, it’s fate that also comes to Amy when she learns about the risks of the internet and the limits of selfies.”
More recently in France, Le Monde, the moment of Amy’s transformation into “when Olivia Newton-John reached the level at the end of Grease turned into a sex bomb, in front of a stunned John Travolta”.
His review writes: “The filmmaker deftly refrains from making a judgment about the very particular sexualization of dances. During the dance festival where the Mignonne perform, explosively, the camera is limited to filming the faces of spectators and the jury, where a multitude of reactions can be read.”
Other awards for Doucouré come with the first academy of the Academy for Women’s Gold Scholarship, awarded through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscars organization, last year. According to Variety, the prize came with a $22,000 ($16,600) grant to help take down Cuties.
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