Cannes 2025 (Competition): The Little Sister (dir. Hafsia Herzi) | Review

Before anyone ever asked her to choose, Fatima had already begun shaping her own path—quietly and on her own terms. A bright, disciplined student, she spends her nights buried in books. She is the youngest of three daughters in a French-Algerian family, raised in a world where faith grounds you—but also draws lines you’re not meant to cross. Her life is built on structure: five daily prayers, modest clothing, and devotion to religious values she has never questioned—until now.

There is a stillness to Fatima (played with aching precision by Nadia Melliti), one that goes unnoticed by those closest to her. Her sisters call her “too masculine,” as if that observation explains everything. But Fatima’s disinterest in beauty rituals or cooking is not rebellion—it is a quiet insistence on being herself. She finds clarity in movement, in football, in thought. Her wardrobe—black, loose, utilitarian—reflects something far more complex: refusal without confrontation.

In The Little Sister (La Petite Dernière), director Hafsia Herzi builds a story on tension—on everything left unsaid. Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Fatima Daas, the film is a study in restraint, portraying a young woman navigating the painful and tender terrain between belief and identity, obedience and desire. Fatima’s world begins to shift when she enters the lecture halls of a philosophy department in central Paris. Here, among strangers who see her neither as daughter nor believer, she begins to ask the most important question of all: Who am I when no one is watching?

There are no dramatic speeches or ruptures. What unfolds is more delicate: the slow, painful realization that some parts of herself cannot exist without betraying others. In one of the film’s most quietly devastating moments, a religious mentor tells her that female homosexuality is forbidden, as is the male one.

Fatima doesn’t confess her secret. Not to her family, not even on her birthday, when the chance briefly opens. But this silence doesn’t read as failure. It feels like survival. In a world that refuses to hold her whole truth, silence becomes a form of quiet resistance.

And yet, on the day that marks her birth, there lingers the haunting sense that another Fatima could have been born too—the one with no more secrets, free not only beyond her home’s walls but within them. Still, in hidden corners, she carves out slivers of freedom. She smokes in secret, despite her asthma—lungs tightening with every inhale, like even her own body won’t let her speak freely. The asthma becomes its own metaphor: a quiet blockade, a physical reminder that speaking freely might never come easily.

It’s in this private life that Fatima meets Ji-Na (played by Ji-Min Park), a young Korean nurse she encounters during a medical course. Their intimacy grows quietly—shy, unsure, but real. It’s her first love. The first encounter with the geography of another woman’s body. The first crack in her carefully built world. The first heartbreak.

The Little Sister is a film about the in-between. Herzi choreographs emotion like a dance, with patience, subtlety, and trust. Nadia Melliti gives a performance of remarkable restraint. Her silences are as sharp as spoken truths. With each look, each breath, she embodies a girl stretched between two worlds—between faith and feeling, tradition and selfhood.

The film doesn’t liberate Fatima—it simply allows her to exist, contradictions and all. Between mother and daughter. Between silence and intimacy. Between body and belief. A girl, beginning to breathe.

Our reporters are on the ground in Cannes, France, to bring you exclusive content from the 78th Cannes Film Festival—explore our coverage here.