Française

Souad El-Bouhati (1962) started her career as a social worker. She graduated in film directing at the Sorbonne in Paris and made her début in 1999 with the short film Salam. In Française, her first feature, El-Bouhati sketches a beautiful picture of a girl who is torn between two worlds.
In the first minutes, we see a girl of Moroccan origins in France. Then the film moves to Morocco, eight years later. El-Bouhati avoids all the clichés of uprooted characters by showing Morocco as a wealthy country where the protagonists have a good and comfortable life. That makes the conflict for Sophia, a role by the prize-winning actress Hafsia Herzi (La graine et le mulet) even more understandable.
The rebellious teenager Sophia feels like a Française, not a Moroccan girl. When her father loses his job, the family moves from one day to the next to Morocco. Eight years later, Sophia is a young woman who dreams of returning to her country, France. She works in her father’s olive orchard. At school she’s a fanatical student. In Morocco, however, its traditional for women to marry after graduation. Sophia is still rebellious and fights the rigid Moroccan social rules and customs. The conflict gets out of hand, especially with her mother (a beautiful role by the former photo model Farida Khelfa).

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