Young French Cinema 2022: The Hill Where Lionesses Roar w/Locked Out
Director: Luàna Bajrami Run Time: 107 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2022
Starring: Andi Bajgora, Era Balaj, Flaka Latifi, Luàna Bajrami, Uratë Shabani
Country: France, Kosovo
Language: French
La colline où rugissent les lionnes/The Hill Where Lionesses Roar is presented at the Film Center and in our Virtual Screening Room as part of Young French Cinema.
Presentations at the Film Center include New French Shorts program selection Julien Goudichaud’s Confinés dehors/Locked Out.
About the film:
Selection of Cannes Film Festival 2021 and TIFF 2021. Eta, Li, and Qe live in an isolated village in Kosovo, a place where ambition dies fast and young women are expected to keep their mouths shut. The three teenage girls find solace in their fierce loyalty to each other and the long afternoons they spend on the hill overlooking their tiny corner of the world. But when they are denied registration at university in a neighboring town, the injustice is too much to accept. The girls form the Lionesses on the Hill gang get to work claiming their future. With the loot from a series of robberies, they blast out of town on an unforgettable journey to freedom.
“It’s incredibly relatable, and makes for a unique backdrop for an age-old story”
—Kate Erbland for IndieWire
While the theme of girl solidarity calls to mind earlier triumphs like The Virgin Suicides and Mustang, Kosovar-French writer-director Luàna Bajrami’s feature debut breaks new ground in its way of capturing the girls’ inner lives. Though only twenty years old, Bajrami displays a distinctly personal approach to filmmaking, perceptible both in the film’s autobiographical aspects—she appears in the film as a Kosovar-French girl visiting from Paris for the summer—and in her impressionistic manner of accumulating apparently banal moments to catch the fleeting sensations of adolescent rage and hope.
Young French Cinema 2022 Program See our upcoming films