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As the heroine of her acclaimed first film, “Cuties,” Maimouna Doucoure knows what it’s like not to be taken seriously.
Her remarkable portrayal of an 11-year-old French woman and her adult friends, caught among traditionalist immigrant families and hypersexualized pop culture, won the Best Director award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
However, even after his short film “Mom(s)” – Mother (s) – a semi-autobiographical account of how he developed in a circle of Senegalese relatives polygamous in Paris – he received awards, some in the status quo of the French film were stunned – amusingly condescending about this 35-year-old, unabestably glamorous man.
“You did it for her, didn’t you? His manufacturer approached through an engine and an agitator, before being firmly told it was his own job.
“I can’t, this woman made this film, it’s so feminine,” the sexist skeptic repeated.
When Doucoure won at Sundance with “Cuties,” which has since been captured via Netflix, he publicly pulled out skeptics.
– ‘Forbidden to dream’ –
“I need to tell this boy and everyone who thinks that femininity means you don’t have the strength to think, write, direct and create, women are to do anything,” he said among deafening cheers.
But young black artists will not only have to climb a wall of prejudice from the outside, Doucoure told the AFP when “Cuties” premiered in France.
They face sabotage from their own communities and even their families, he said.
“When I was little, I was forbidden to dream,” the director said.
His mother, a housekeeper, told him that making videos was not for “his peers,” that other people who recorded videos didn’t look like him. In other words, black women.
“I missed so many role models when I was developing,” Doucoure said of his years of formation in a polygamous giant circle of relatives in northern Paris presided over by his father Binman.
“Television is a kind of mirror of society, yet, for me, I have never noticed my reflection. This makes it difficult to open up all imaginative possibilities,” he added.
But Doucoure proved that his mother and many others have been since then.
And he feels he’s paving the way for others, helping to “break down the intellectual barriers” that have held black people down.
– “Things move” –
In fact, in his poignant acceptance speech at Sundance, he cited Oprah Winfrey’s maxim of that “You Believe.”
“Believe me, ladies!” Doucoure said.
The movements #MeToo and Black Lives Matters earthquakes in the entertainment industry, believes times are changing.
Doucoure proudly counts walking with French actress Adele Haenel and the director of “Girlhood” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” Céline Sciamma at a rally in the paris suburbs following the death in police custody of Adama Traoré, the young black man noticed through Guy as Frenchman George Floyd.
“Things are moving, I feel like I’m going at that moment, ” said Doucoure.
She doesn’t alone, either.
– New black wave –
Black British writer and director Michaela Coel, whose parents are from Ghana, has earned the highest compliment for her hard-hitting series of rapes in an “I May Destroy You” date, while Issa Rae, who like Doucoure has Senegalese roots, has a small screen phenomenon. for his series “Insecure” and “Awkward Black Girl”, in which, as Coel, he also stars.
And another Parisian Mati Diop won last year the grand jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival for “Atlantics”, which he filmed in Senegal, where his father was born musician Wasis Diop.
Doucoure also evokes the unexpected good fortune of Jean-Pascal Zadi’s witty black comedy “Simply Black”, one of the biggest summer hits in French cinemas, as a sign of progress.
But it remains to be done.
“We want completely other models to break down barriers with fiction,” Doucoure said.
“From the moment we open our imagination, anything will be possible.”
After writing and preparing “Cuties” while pregnant, and throwing it away while carrying her daughter with a scarf, Doucoure said she is an example of what is possible.
“Coming out of nowhere,” she prides herself on being a symbol of the opening of French cinematic culture from clicking, which she says is “above all a game of rich.”
The director is recently working on two new films, one of which, focused on social media, will soon begin shooting, if the coronavirus allows.
“When young women can get 400,000 I like taking a sexy selfie… we have to offer them a way of being. Dream of being female astronauts, engineers or presidents…”
Or even directors.
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