Top 150 Most Anticipated Foreign Films of 2019: #73. Sisters (Soeurs) – Yamina Benguigui

Sisters (Soeurs)

It’s been eighteen years since Yamina Benguigui’s critically acclaimed 2001 debut Inch’Allah dimanche, and she’s back with sophomore narrative feature Sisters (Soeurs). Benguigui (also serving as producer) finds a stellar trio of actresses as her three ‘sisters,’ including Isabelle Adjani (who recently made a high-profile reappearance in Romain Gavras’ The World is Yours), Maiwenn, and Rachida Bakri who starred in Coline Serreau’s 2001 title Chaos (Maiwenn’s first film appearance was as Adani’s daughter in Jean Becker’s One Deadly Summer – 1983). This will also be the first project Adjani has filmed in her father’s native country. Benguigui’s debut premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2001 and she has since worked in documentary and television (including “Aicha,” which is where she first worked with Adjani).

Gist: With a script co-written by Abdel Raouf Dafri (A Prophet, 2009), Adjani stars as a film director, Bakri a member of parliament, and Maiwenn a business leader, their experiences used as a lens to examine a woman’s relationship to her country or origin vs. her host country. Benguigui has described the project as “a woman’s film only with women.”

Release Date/Prediction: Benguigui’s eleven week shoot began in October 2018 between Algiers, Oran, and Constantine. With the films French actresses, we could expect to see Sisters pop up in a Cannes 2019 sidebar.