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We’re introduced to a young girl named Cléo, who lives in Paris with her father after losing her mother at a young age. Her nanny Gloria has been by her side for almost as long as she can remember, providing love and care. Gloria is originally from Cape Verde, but one day she receives tragic news: her own mother has passed, and Gloria must return home permanently to be there for her family.

This upsets the stable life little Cléo has known. To help ease the transition, her father arranges for her to visit Gloria in Cape Verde for the summer, hoping it will help the two adjust to their new circumstances. But Cléo struggles amid this change as she begins to understand that Gloria has commitments of her own. Living now in Gloria’s world, Cléo encounters relationships, traditions, and cultures unfamiliar to her. Through it all, she...

Ilça Moreno Zego and Louise Mauroy-Panzani in Àma Gloria. Marie Amachoukeli: 'The link between a nanny and her child is often stronger than the link between a mother and her child' Photo: UniFrance It took director Marie Amachoukeli quite a while to launch forth into her second feature Àma Gloria which explores the relationship between a nanny and her charge and all the taboos surrounding the subject.

Amachoukeli, who is French of Georgian extraction, had just finished Party Girl in 2014 (co-directed and written with Claire Burger and Samuel Theis) which won the Camera d’Or prize for a first film at the Cannes Film Festival. It tells of a 60-year-old woman who provides company for men at nightclubs on the French-German border and who decides to leave the street life behind her by marrying a regular customer.

Rather than seize the moment she explained: “I wanted to wait a while,...

Six year old Louise Mauroy-Panzani is wonderful as Cléo, strongly bonded to her carer Gloria, who has to leave her

By rights Louise Mauroy-Panzani should be at the front of the queue for every acting award going for her role in this gorgeous French drama. Just six years old at the time of filming (the casting director spotted her in Paris arguing with her brother in the street), she gives a performance so open and natural, it has an almost transparent quality. You feel what her character Cléo feels as her world is turned upside down over one summer. Equally brilliant is another first-time actor, Ilça Moreno Zego, a real-life nanny playing Gloria, who has taken care of Cléo since she was tiny and is now moving back to Cape Verde.

The opening scenes showing us Cléo’s life with Gloria are beautifully detailed. Cléo’s mum died when she was a baby,...

The wisdom and emotional reach of a six-year-old girl trying to make sense of the world and her place within it is explored with rigour and sensitivity by writer and director Marie Amachoukeli.

It’s one of the most moving portraits of childhood seen recently on the screen, bringing to mind Celine Sciamma’s equally affecting Petite Maman which covered some similar territory with a more fantastical style.

In a narrative that contains autobiographical elements Amachoukeli examines the intimate bond between Cape Verdean nanny Gloria (played by newcomer Ilça Moreno Zego) and her charge Cleo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani) whose mother has died of cancer. The youngster is being raised in the family flat in Paris by her struggling father (Arnaud Rebotini).

When her mother passes away Gloria decides to return to Cape Verde, leaving with the promise that Cleo, feeling painfully abandoned, can join her for the holidays. The reunion presents Cleo with a whole new.

The complex plights of migrant women who leave homes and children seeking means to provide for them have rarely been addressed with the sensitivity and delicateness of Àma Gloria, which looks at it through a new lens: a six-year-old French girl, Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani), who has to come to terms with the abrupt departure of her beloved nanny Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego).

Cléo has no recollection of the mother she lost to cancer years before. The only maternal figure she knows is Gloria, the Cape Verdean woman who looks after her while her father (Arnaud Rebotini) is at work. Cléo’s world revolves around Gloria, who feeds her, showers her with affection, and helps shape the way she looks at life. The love between them is undeniable, but Cléo has no idea Gloria had a life far away from her. How could she? Children don’t understand the dynamics of work or things like migration.

For all its many, many faults, 2023 was a banner year for international films. The awards season buzz for global gems like Justine Triet’s French courtroom thriller Anatomy of a Fall (released by Neon stateside), Jonathan Glazer’s German-language Holocaust drama Zone of Interest (A24), Hayao Miyazaki’s Japanese anime The Boy and the Heron (GKids), and J.A. Bayona’s Spanish-language real-life survival tale Society of the Snow (Netflix) only scratches the surface.

Among the many many other foreign highlights from last year are Mubi’s Fallen Leaves and How to Have Sex — the first a laconic triumph by Finnish film master Aki Kaurismäki, the latter a stunning debut by Brit first-timer Molly Manning Walker — Sony Pictures Classics’ The Teachers’ Lounge, a German school drama from director Ilker Çatak and Iranian drama Shayda from director Noora Niasari; Agnieszka Holland’s harrowing The Green Border, about Poland’s treatment of would-be...

In “Àma Gloria,” directed by Marie Amachoukeli, childhood is the domain of formative gains and losses. After opening this year’s Cannes Critics’ Week, the film screened as part of the Meet the Neighbors+ competition at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Amachoukeli previously co-directed “Party Girl,” which won Cannes’ Camera d’Or in 2014.

“Àma Gloria” introduces us to six-year-old Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani), who lives in Paris with her widower dad Arnaud (Arnaud Rebotini) and her nanny Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego). A blissfully constructed day-to-day routine keeps the world in order until one day Gloria has to return to her Cape Verdean family. In preparation to leave France for good, she invites Cléo to spend the summer with her in Cape Verde.

“Àma Gloria” unfolds as an exploration of childhood through the eyes of its young protagonist. Reviewing the film for Variety, critic Jessica Kiang called it “a debut made dazzling by...

Eva Vik’s ‘Serpentine’ Starring Barbara Palvin To Make European Premiere at Taormina

Eva Vik’s short film Serpentine, starring supermodel Barbara Palvin, will make its European premiere at the 69th edition of Italy’s Taormina Film Festival, running from June 23 to July 1. Czech writer and director Eva Vik explores the possibilities of interspecies development in the film, which was previously nominated for the X Award at the Tribeca Film Festival. Set within a mysterious snake cult, the stylistic body-horror follows attempts to initiate a snake-human hybrid through genetic engineering – creating an extraterrestrial higher power intelligence as a new influential force. Palvin is joined in the cast by Soo Joo Park, and Luke Brandon Field. The film’s official partner is Bulgari brand, and it was produced by Evasion Pictures. The film will play in Taormina’s Influential Shorts program, a special gala event curated by Bella Thorne. “I look...

It is unlikely that this Cannes will yield many characters as strikingly well-drawn as Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani), the star of Marie Amachoukeli’s small but acutely affecting Critics’ Week opener “Ama Gloria.” Over the course of an efficient 84 minutes, Cléo changes and resists change, she learns and rejects life lessons, she befriends and betrays. She is funny, somber, silly, conniving, shockingly selfish and shiningly pure, sometimes all in the space of an afternoon. She is six years old.

Cléo, a bundle of personality under a tangle of hair and pair of thick glasses, lives in Paris with her affable widower Dad, Arnaud (Arnaud Rebotini), but is raised mostly by her beloved Cape Verdean nanny Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego). Their relationship is close as a goodnight kiss, and obviously mutually adoring — witness the exchange of incandescent smiles when Cléo sees Gloria waiting at the school gates. So it’s a heavy...