Girlhood

Marieme is sixteen and lives in a housing project on the outskirts of Paris with her mother, her older brother and her two sisters. Her life is shaped by restrictions: the rules of the neighborhood, the expectations placed on girls by the boys who claim the streets, and a school system that offers her no real way forward. Everything changes when she meets three girls her own age who move through the world with a freedom she has never had. She joins them, takes the name Vic, changes how she dresses and leaves school behind, hoping that belonging to the group will give her a way out.

Céline Sciamma wrote and directed the film, her third feature after Water Lilies and Tomboy, with Bénédicte Couvreur producing. Karidja Touré plays Marieme, also called Vic, alongside Assa Sylla, Lindsay Karamoh and Mariétou Touré as the girls she joins, with Idrissa Diabaté and Cyril Mendy among the supporting cast. The film is a French drama running just under two hours.

On IMDb it holds 6.9 from around 11,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.5 from roughly 400. The critics' rating is 8.1 from 82 reviews, noticeably higher than either audience figure. It came out in October 2014, between Tomboy and Portrait of a Lady on Fire in the director's filmography.