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.