Die jüngste Tochter

“Seventeen-year-old Fatima is the youngest of three daughters in a French-Algerian family in a Paris suburb. Her favourite sport is football, at school she hangs around with the most boastful boys in her class, and she has a secret steady boyfriend who is already thinking about marriage. But Fatima is finding it harder and harder to hide what nobody can be allowed to know: her heart beats for women. When she begins studying philosophy in Paris, a completely new world opens up. Torn between family tradition, faith and her own wish for freedom, Fatima has to find her own way.

‘The Last One’ is an adaptation of Fatima Daas’s celebrated autofictional debut novel of 2020, and the third feature by the French star actor and director Hafsia Herzi. With emotional and truthful force, the film accompanies a young woman’s sexual coming of age and her search for a place in the world. Cast largely with non-professional actors, staged with tenderness and unafraid to break taboos, Hafsia Herzi has made an instant classic of queer cinema in the tradition of Abdellatif Kechiche’s ‘Blue Is the Warmest Colour’, Céline Sciamma’s ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and Barry Jenkins’s ‘Moonlight’. In her first role in front of a camera, Nadia Melliti makes a stunning entrance into acting with a performance of powerful restraint. At Cannes she was awarded the prize for best performance for it. The film also won the Queer Palm.” (Alamode, translated from the German)

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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