Maïmouna Doucouré’s Cuties (Mignonnes) is a powerful and emotionally moving film about Western society’s oversexualization of young girls that also manages to find genuine warmth and humor in the midst of this poignant tale of having the illusions of childhood fade away at much too early an age. That Doucouré manages to balance this all without ever letting the film become a dry, intellectual slog is something of a miracle. She has crafted such an incredibly honest and heartfelt narrative about what it is to be an eleven-year-old girl trapped between two very different worlds. Doucouré contrasts the restrictive and confining spaces in the apartment of her young protagonist’s family with the open and airy spaces she finds when she’s with her new friends. But then she tempers that visual freedom by creating a sense of danger and unease in these open spaces – whether through the use of abandoned train tracks running through the middle of a scene or a decrepit building that intrudes into the frame. Doucouré’s script captures all of the pain and humor and awkwardness of the pre-teen years, and then shows how much harder it is to navigate when you don’t have any parents to help you make sense of the hyper-sexualized images of women that you encounter everywhere. Trapped between a family with harsh and repressive gender expectations on one side and a society that is encouraging her oversexualization at such an early age, the film’s protagonist has to find a different path than the one her family or society have laid out for her. And Doucouré captures this in a denouement that is breathtaking and powerful.