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Films

Cuties (Mignonnes)

Majalli Fatah rips apart a so-called ‘feminist’ critique of an uncomfortable feminist film.

The backlash against Franco-Senegalese director Maïmouna Doucouré’s recent coming-of-age film Mignonnes (Cuties in English), as being both racist and anti-feminist, is a clear example of everything it rhetorically rages against.

Mignonnes is a Muslim female director’s tender portrait of an eleven-year-old Senegalese-French girl struggling to navigate a lonely childhood and the contradictory expectations placed on her. The narrative follows the protagonist Amy and her crew of pre-teen girls living in a fairly deprived Parisian environment. It deals with neglect and the competing influences of conservative patriarchal Islamic culture and a modern Western culture which continually feeds youngsters highly sexualized images and messages. Set in cramped Paris apartments, schools, and outdoor empty lots, the film neither condemns nor endorses what it shows.

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