Projects in development
LUCKY GIRL
Synopsis
While on vacation in Bordeaux, four-year-old Lili and her brothers, aged nine and twenty, are left to fend for themselves when their flamboyant mother goes home to her restaurant-disco business in Gabon without them. Torn between the desire to return to her lost paradise and the duty to seize the chance to make her mother proud, Lili grows up developing strategies to survive, find success, and return to the bright lights of her native Africa.
Partners attached
Cofinova Développement, Europe Creative Media, Procirep Angoa
Director’s statement
elling my own story confirmed a paradox for me: the more personal a story is, the more universal it will be. Lucky Girl tells the story of an African girl who, against her will, winds up as an immigrant in France, along with her older brothers. The screenplay tells of the powerful heritage handed down by a flamboyant matriarch—omnipresent despite her absence—to her daughter, who forces herself to succeed in order to honor her mother. The story questions the so-called luck of life in the West. Lucky Girl is a coming-of-age film that features a few forays into the fantastic: mirrors into which the heroine projects herself to escape the stress resulting from the trauma of racism and being uprooted. It's a tale of joy, sacrifice, and the lost paradise of childhood and its illusions, which lead us to idolize our parents. My aim is to make a poignant, intense, and sensory film told from Lili's unique point of view.
Biographies
Linda Lô is a French-Senegalese writer, director, and actor. After studying at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she collaborated with director Nikyatu Jusu on her first film, African Booty Scratcher (2007). Lô’s essay En exil chez soi (2008) recounts her intricate quest for identity across Africa, Europe, and the United States. Her script for Full Moon Day was selected for the Maison des Scénaristes at the Festival de Cannes in 2014. She has co-written two scripts with Rebecca Zlotowski, and completed a directing internship at the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière. In 2023, she directed her first short film C'était bien, which was produced by Maneki Films and sold internationally by Lights On.
Since founding the production company Maneki Films in 2009, Didar Domehri has produced or co-produced over 25 films, including Santiago Mitre’s Paulina (2015), which won the Grand Prix in La Semaine de la Critique, The Summit (2017), presented at Cannes, 15 Ways to Kill Your Neighbour (2022); and Laurent Cantet's Return to Ithaca (2014), which won the Grand Prix at the Venice International Film Festival. Recent productions, all selected for Cannes, include Judith Godrèche's Me Too (2024); Karim Aïnouz's Motel Destino (2024) in the Official Competition at Cannes; Erige Sehiri's Under the Fig Trees (2022); Hlynur Pálmason's Godland (2022), presented in Un Certain Regard; and Alex Lutz's Strangers by Night (2023).
