Shot by movie director Houda Benyamina, born in 1980, she is a French director and screenwriter. The movie is now available on the Netflix platform. The cast consists of Oulaya Amamra as Dounia and Déborah Lukumuena as Maimouna, the two main characters.

It won a category at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and was in the official selection of the Toronto International Film Festival in the Discovery section.

This movie talks about the struggle of life and the survival of two best friends, Dounia and Maimouna, who live in the suburbs of Paris, France. They are the daughters of Arab immigrants, living in poverty and uncertainty, unable to see a future ahead of them.

One of them is particularly rebellious, Dounia, and her best friend follows her and trusts her fully. They attend school, but Dounia doesn’t care at all about studying and learning…

This is the new generation we are living in; hardly anyone cares about education, and everyone just wants to make ‘easy money.’ They go to any length to get it without thinking about the consequences or risks they might take.

At the beginning of the movie, we see the motto of the students during class: ‘money money,’ signing and moving their hands like throwing money around and having lots of it!

This is the terrible message that nowadays we receive from social media and society: the more money you have, the more power you have, the more you are worth, the cooler you are, and in the end, it is all about making money, more and more of it. In the end, it doesn’t really matter how they earn it, but how much they have of it.

Both of them smoke joints from a young age, and they usually go and hide on top of a theatre, where underneath them we see a group of contemporary dancers rehearsing for an audition.

In this movie, what I loved the most is the heavy difference between choosing a different life out of poverty, following dance and arts, or ending up in the path of gangs, selling drugs, and going to jail and trouble. Dounia and Maimouna start getting involved in the tough life of working for a woman gangster that treats them like scum, just to make easy ‘money money.’

Both of the girls want to climb up the ladder of the gangster's life to become rich and get a Ferrari and all the clothes and guys they want.

So at one stage of the film, they start stealing petrol for their gang’s boss and then selling drugs in their neighbourhood.

They are both banned from the local supermarket for getting caught stealing more than once. It is extremely sad to see how two young girls with a life ahead of them choose the worst path to get into instead of choosing a life of studying, education, and an honest path of improving their lifestyle.

It is also beautiful to see how the world of dance, art, and love is intertwined in this life of poverty, abuse, and no way out. This is visible in beautiful scenes of dancing, passion, and love between Dounia and a dancer that she meets, who is also a security guard at the supermarket where she gets caught stealing with her best friend Maimouna.

This movie is sincerely dramatic but intensely real and reflects a part of our society that is extremely badly written, thought, and lived. I don’t want to write a spoiler, so I strongly recommend that you watch it.

Dounia’s mother at the beginning of the movie is working in a nightclub; she is an alcoholic and sleeps with anyone around the neighbourhood. Dounia has never met her father; she does not know who she is, and they call her ‘the bastard’ for this reason.

She is deeply affected by her mother’s life, even if she loves her, and this instability and surrounding dysfunctionality are extremely damaging to her life, which leads her to do unimaginable things to get that ‘money money.’

This movie is a sad story about someone who wants to improve their life by wrongdoings and tear their lives apart forever, making those types of mistakes that will cause them trauma for the rest of their lives and also lead to death, something from which there is no way back.

The messages we are giving to the new generations are deeply wrong… Money does not define who we are or how worthy we are; money should be a vessel, not the purpose of one’s life.

Life is not all about money, and it is always better to earn it in an honest and good way, by being productive members of our society and through our hard work, contributing to the creation of value on this planet and in humanity.