Paris (AFP)

From working-class districts of Paris to international festivals: noted for her first feature film, which hits theaters on Wednesday, "Mignonnes", director Maïmouna Doucouré urges young black women to "break down mental barriers" in their professional lives.

The film, whose release has been postponed due to the health crisis, paints a deep and sensitive portrait of an eleven-year-old Parisian girl, torn between the rules of a polygamous Senegalese family and the tyranny of social networks and selfies. .

Like an echo of the 35-year-old director's own journey, who grew up with her mother, a housekeeper and shopkeeper, her father as a garbage collector, and his other wife, surrounded by nine brothers and sisters, in a neighborhood popular in the 19th arrondissement of the capital.

The cinema, she does not discover it in theaters, but in front of the horror films of the 1990s which pass on the small screen and which she watches, fascinated, with her brothers.

"When I was little, I clearly forbade myself to dream," says Maïmouna Doucouré today, whose mother explained that cinema was not for her, since we never saw people who looked like her. That is to say black women.

"In my childhood, I was terribly lacking in role models," she continues. "Television is a kind of mirror of society, but I had the impression of never seeing my reflection in it. It is then difficult to open up the field of possibilities and imaginations".

Three decades later, after a hook by studies of biology, Maïmouna Doucouré gives the wrong to her mother, and begins to believe herself "in (her) place": She leaves her first feature film, a film which gathered a reception warmth at international festivals.

Conclusion: a prize in Berlin, after a first distinction for its realization at Sundance. Icing on the cake, Netflix will distribute it outside of France. By receiving her prize in the United States, Maïmouna Doucouré, long loose black hair, confident and frank gaze, says she is "more feminine than ever" and quotes Oprah Winfrey: "We become what we believe in". And to launch: "Ladies, let's believe it!".

Women astronauts

While the issues of diversity and gender equality are more burning than ever in French cinema, Maïmouna Doucouré, born in France to parents who arrived in the 1970s from Senegal, considers herself "a French director above all. . "

"Things are progressing, I have this feeling of arriving at the right time", she rejoices, happy with the "box" of the comedy "Simply black", or to see the institutions of the cinema start to work for the diversity - although much remains to be done.

Denying herself to have wanted to make "a social pamphlet", this fan of Briton Ken Loach or Iranian Asghar Farhadi admires the commitment of actress Adèle Haenel and director Céline Sciamma. She keeps the memory of a demonstration by their side, with the relatives of Adama Traoré, this young man who died in 2016 after his arrest by the gendarmes of Val d'Oise.

"We need different models, to break down barriers thanks to fiction. From the moment we open the imaginations, in reality, everything becomes possible", judge Maïmouna Doucouré, who prepared "Mignonnes" pregnant with her little girl, and did "all the casting with her in a baby sling".

Maïmouna Doucouré "comes from nowhere", it is "a symbol of the democratization of cinema, she had no predisposition at all in this world which is above all a sport for the rich", greets her producer, Zangro, who accompanies him since the beginning, seduced by his direction of actors and "his way of speaking the same language as the children".

The director has now embarked on the writing of two other films, one of which should soon start shooting. "When young girls see that we collect 400,000 likes by making sexy selfies, they enter into a mimicry without really understanding the mechanism. We must offer them other paths. Women astronauts, presidents of the Republic, engineers. .. "Or filmmakers.

© 2020 AFP