Video Interview: Maïmouna Doucouré – Cuties | 2020 Sundance Film Festival

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With her award-winning short Maman(s), Maïmouna Doucouré masterfully details the traumas associated by living in a nonsecular upbringing. Mining from her own experiences and peripheral backdrop, the French filmmaker doubles down on the notion of being weighed down when secluded but also infuses the text with femininity, cultural identity, womanhood and the deeply almost life or death need to belonging. The Sundance Film Festival winning Cuties is fresh, spunky cinema and captures unfiltered combative girlhood fighting to make some sense about the adult world that surrounds them (perhaps this is a spiritual French cousin to Sean Baker’s The Florida Project). The project was picked up by Netflix prior to the festival — a big deal for a first time feature that had yet to debut at the festival.

Eric Lavallée
Eric Lavalléehttps://www.ericlavallee.com
Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist, and critic at IONCINEMA.com, established in 2000. A regular at Sundance, Cannes, and Venice, Eric holds a BFA in film studies from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013, he served on the narrative competition jury at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson’s "This Teacher" (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022, he was a New Flesh Juror for Best First Feature at the Fantasia International Film Festival. His top films for 2023 include The Zone of Interest (Glazer), Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An), Totem (Lila Avilés), La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher), All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson). He is a Golden Globes Voter.

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