Bande de filles
Gang of Girls
Girlhood

First-time actress Karidja Touré gives a wonderfully textured internal performance as a shy sixteen-year-old Afro-French girl who experiments with identity as she tries to find a way out of her gritty, male-dominated, lower-class Parisian neighborhood. Through a series of excellently scripted and staged sequences, we watch young Marieme redefine herself over and over until she runs out of ways of presenting externally to the world and must turn inwards to find the answers she seeks. Writer/director Céline Sciamma (Water Lilies, Tomboy) applies the style and trappings of the personal coming-of-age indie movie to a film that still feels more like a work of contemporary anthropology. Thus, we never feel inside the main character’s head, but we are more than content to watch from a distinctly observational (if intriguing) distance.