HAWA
Saturday, October 15 – Renoir Theatre – 1:30 pm
(Screening ends at 3:40 pm)
+ Short Film Presentation: FREEDOM SWIMMER
Followed by a conversation with writer/director Maïmouna Doucouré
FICTION / DRAMA
FRENCH NEWAVE 2.0
Presented in Association with:
Amazon Prime Video
France Televisions
Women in Film
U.S. Premiere | France | 2022 | Drama, Comedy | 104 min | In French with English subtitles
Directed by: Maïmouna Doucouré
Written by: Maïmouna Doucouré
Produced by: Zangro (Bien ou Bien Productions), Amazon Studios
Cinematography: Antoine Sanier
Film Editing: Nicolas Desmaison
Original Score: Erwann Chandon
Cast: Sania Halifa (Hawa), Oumou Sangaré, Yseult (herself), Chanchal Chowdhury, Thomas Pesquet (himself)
International Distributor: Amazon Prime Video
Hawa, a 15-year-old girl with a spectacular blond afro, Coke-bottle glasses, and an innate disregard for convention, is not your typical Parisian teen. Maminata, her beloved grandmother and sole guardian, is terminally ill and doesn’t have long to live. But she still hasn’t found a family to take in her soon-to-be orphaned granddaughter. So Hawa comes up with the perfect solution herself. Michelle Obama is visiting Paris and has publicly expressed how much she misses her daughters, now that they’ve grown-up and moved out. Obviously, the Obamas should adopt Hawa. Now she just has to convince the former First Lady.
Born in Paris to Senegalese parents, Maïmouna Doucouré grew up in a polygamous family with two mothers. She graduated with a degree in biology from Pierre and Marie Curie University, and made her first short film, Hide-and-seek, in 2013. Her second short, Mother(s) (2015), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, was screened at Sundance, shared the César Award for Best Short Film with Alice Diop’s Towards Tenderness, and won the COLCOA Short Film Jury Award. The screenplay for her highly-lauded but somewhat controversial first feature, Cuties (2020), won the Sundance Global Filmmaking Award in 2017, eventually premiering in the World Cinema Dramatic section of the Sundance Film Festival, where it garnered the World Cinema Directing Award. That film subsequently nabbed a Most Promising Actress César Award for its talented young lead, Fathia Youssouf. Hawa, her second feature, premiered in the Platform section of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
