Fatima
A small miracle of a film from the French director Philippe Faucon.
Fatima
Middle aged single mother Fatima lives with her two teenage daughters and works cleaning jobs to pay their way through school. Inspired by a true story and the poetry of the North African writer Fatima Elayoubi, who immigrated knowing very little French and slowly taught herself the language. A patient, reflective study of a woman pressured by her children and her neighbors alike to assimilate into a culture of which she's wary. Despite the display of everyday racism, both veiled and overt; internal domestic disputes and external gestures of inhospitality, Fatima offers an uplifting experience and one of recent French cinema's most trenchant and moving portraits of immigrant experience.
Director’s Statement:
My grandparents didn’t speak French, and neither did my mother when she was a child. They were “the invisible ones” in the society they lived in. Some of Fatima’s manners remind me of them. She is like those women, only partly schooled, who had to emigrate out of vital necessity, to come and live in a country whose language and codes were completely unknown to them. In France, they gave birth to children and raised them, even though sometimes they were kept apart by the language or by different customs and points of reference. For all these reasons, regardless of the things they didn’t know or master, these women have developed major resources, drawn from fierce courage and obstinacy. - Philippe Faucon
Director’s Statement:
My grandparents didn’t speak French, and neither did my mother when she was a child. They were “the invisible ones” in the society they lived in. Some of Fatima’s manners remind me of them. She is like those women, only partly schooled, who had to emigrate out of vital necessity, to come and live in a country whose language and codes were completely unknown to them. In France, they gave birth to children and raised them, even though sometimes they were kept apart by the language or by different customs and points of reference. For all these reasons, regardless of the things they didn’t know or master, these women have developed major resources, drawn from fierce courage and obstinacy. - Philippe Faucon
Genre
Drama
Runtime
79
Language
French,
Arabic
Director
Philippe Faucon
Writer(s)
Philippe Faucon,
Fatima Elayoubi,
Yasmina Nini-Faucon,
Mustapha Kharmoudi,
Aziza Boudjellal
Cast
Soria Zeroual,
Zita Hanrot,
Kenza Noah Aïche,
Chawki Amari
Awards:
Winner, Best Film, Cesar Awards
Winner, Best Adapted Screenplay, Cesar Awards
Nominee, Best Actress, Cesar Awards
Winner, Most Promising Actress, Cesar Awards
MOREFEATURED REVIEW
Justin Chang, Variety
In a 2015 Cannes Film Festival lineup that generated much ado about “the year of the woman” and the troubling divisions in modern French society, few pictures merged these concerns quite as deftly or economically as Philippe Faucon’s “Fatima,” a warm and insightful dramedy about a Moroccan-born ...
Played at
Royal 9.16.16 - 9.29.16
Playhouse 7 9.24.16 - 10.02.16
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