An Interfaith Friendship Where Independence and Family Pull Against Each Other

In its TIFF coverage, IndieWire describes Hanaël El Yousfi's feature debut as following the ongoing relationship between a Jewish woman and her Muslim friend. The reviewer's read is that the film illustrates a conflict it treats as universal: the desire for independence set against the desire for family connection. That's a pointed framing. Plenty of films about friendship across a religious line make the religion the crisis; this one, at least as the review characterizes it, puts the more ordinary and more stubborn tension at the center — the wish to be your own person versus the pull of the people who made you one. Whether the film earns the word universal is the reviewer's claim to defend, but it is a more interesting ambition than a story that simply asks two friends to reconcile their differences.