The Last One

The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Fatima Daas is raised in a home where love and sexuality are considered taboo and signs of affection avoided. Living in the majority-Muslim Clichy-sous-Bois, she often spends hours a day commuting into the city, where she feels like a tourist observing Parisian life. She goes from unstable student to maladjusted adult, doing years of therapy. As she gains distance from her family, she grapples with her attraction to women and how it fits with her religion, which she continues to practice. When Nina comes into her life, she doesn’t know exactly what she needs but feels that something crucial has been missing.

''Through fiction, I was able to explore everything that had made me,'' Daas says. ''Being a woman, but not what was expected of a woman. Being a north African woman, but also French, the only member of the family born in France. Being lesbian, being Muslim. It was almost a luxury for me, through fiction, to make all those identities coexist in my central character. I knew that those identities were in tension and confrontation in society, but for once, through fiction, I felt like I was liberating and reconciling them''