Ama Gloria (Bright Horizons)

Rating:

Key Cast: Abnara Gomes Varela, Arnaud Rebotini, Domingos Borges Almeida, Fredy Gomes Tavares, Ilça Moreno Zego, Louise Mauroy-Panzani
Director: Marie Amachoukeli
Producer: Bénédicte Couvreur
Screenwriter: Marie Amachoukeli
Cinematographer: Inès Tabarin
Composer: Fanny Martin
Company Credit: Distributor: Palace Films

From Cannes Critics’ Week comes a heartbreaking and unforgettably tender portrait of a six-year-old French girl’s bond with her Cape Verdean nanny.

In an astonishing performance of charisma and detail, Louise Mauroy-Panzani plays Cléo, a Parisian child who lives with her widower dad but is largely raised by her Cape Verdean nanny Gloria, whom she adores. When Gloria is informed that her mother has died, she must return to her homeland to look after her own children, who have grown into adulthood in her absence. Distraught, Cléo decides to spend the summer with her nanny and discovers the life the woman had to leave behind.

Opening this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week, the debut solo feature from French filmmaker and 2014 Camera d’Or winner Marie Amachoukeli (It’s Free for Girls, MIFF 2010) is a compellingly delicate drama filled with warm, feel-good energy that’s impossible to resist. Produced by Céline Sciamma’s Lilies Films, it shares with that director’s Petite Maman (MIFF 2021) a keenly observed sense of childhood, capturing a transformative, once-in-a-lifetime relationship with extraordinary sensitivity. And Mauroy-Panzani’s breakout rendition – displaying wonder and precocious maturity at all of six years old – is one for the ages.

“Moving and exquisitely sensitive … Amachoukeli paints an incredibly accurate and poignant picture which is inspired in the simple way it singles out subtle yet incredibly crucial moments.” – Cineuropa