Paris (AFP)
She had achieved notoriety in spite of herself in a scandal involving footballers: ex-escort girl Zahia Dehar finds a first real role in the cinema in Rebecca Zlotowski's "An Easy Girl", a feminist auteur film that follows two cousins for a summer in Cannes.
Awarded the SACD (Société des auteurs compositeurs dramatiques) prize at the last Cannes Film Festival in the parallel section of Directors' Fortnight, "Une fille facile", released Wednesday, tells the story of the liberated Sophia (Zahia Dehar), who sleeps with rich men and is offered gifts, and his cousin Naima (Mina Farid), younger, fascinated by the world of luxury and desire she discovers.
"An easy girl is not pejorative, it's a woman who flourishes in her sexuality as a man.It is rare to see a woman like Sophia celebrated like that", said to the 'AFP in Cannes in May Zahia Dehar, reconverted as a stylist and now an actress.
The former escort girl had been very publicized in the early 2010s during the scandal involving players from the France team who had used her services while she was a minor.
She became famous for being the "birthday present" of the footballer Franck Ribery in 2009, before embarking on the creation of luxury lingerie.
"I am more sympathetic to the women victims of the public parish," told AFP Rebecca Zlotowski about his actress.
"To be a feminist we do not need to show women astronauts or neurosurgeons.I have fun to show women in the cliché of surféminité", added the director, member of the collective 50/50, born in the wake of the Weinstein affair and the #MeToo wave.
Aggregated in French language and literature, this graduate from Femis sees in her film - which she defines as an "amoral summer tale" - a dialogue with Eric Rohmer's "The Collector".
"Very quickly I know that the subject will be the question of power, power, domination, on all terrains," she said.
In the production notes of the film, referring to her meeting with Zahia Dehar, "a recognition", she says she was attracted by being "so foreign in every way" and "the way Zahia put the emphasis on the feminine in what he has exacerbated and overcame ".
She adds that she later discovered that Zahia spoke "in an extraordinarily elegant manner", with "the phrasing of a character from a film by Eric Rohmer", and was "seduced right away".
© 2019 AFP