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“Why do they want to kill you?” At 15, Lesia (Ghjuvanna Benedetti) is still daddy’s girl. She knows but doesn’t want to know the answer to her question, just as she has always known what Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci) does for a living — a very good living — but doesn’t acknowledge it to herself. “Money. Power. You don’t talk to these kinds of people,” her father shrugs. You wouldn’t want to talk to him either, not without an invitation.

Julien Colonna’s robust story of Corsican rule by the Mob is set in the ’90s, when the island was so thick with revenge killings that they were a nightly news feature. As The Kingdom opens, there has been peace between the Corsican crime families for years, but the eruption of a car bomb aimed at the president, who also happens to be Pierre-Paul’s closest friend, is a...

The shadow of The Godfather looms large over French director Julien Colonna’s formidable feature debut, The Kingdom (Le Royaume), and not only because one of the characters in it is literally called “Godfather.”

Set in Corsica in 1995, at a time when the island was wracked by warfare among nationalist groups and crime families, the film focuses on one mafioso clan that’s beset by enemies on all sides and needs to survive by any means necessary. The head of that clan is a very casually dressed Don Corleone named Pierre-Paul (Saveriu Santucci), and he needs to both preserve his leadership and protect his teenage daughter, Lesia (the illuminating Ghjuvanna Benedetti), as they run from cops and mobsters alike.

So yes, it’s a very Godfather-like scenario — but it’s as if the Coppola classic were told from the viewpoint of a young Connie, chronicling how a girl on the...

Un Certain Regard is always a time to explore new, daring films from first- and second-time feature filmmakers at the Cannes Film Festival. They’ll eventually be eligible for the Camera d’Or, the Un Certain Regard equivalent of the Palme d’Or. So if you’re looking for something to see outside the main competition at Cannes this year, Julien Colonna’s Un Certain Regard entry is a simmering and intense coming-of-age story about a teenage girl coming of age amid a criminal family. And that family is maybe one she doesn’t want to reconnect with but is forced to over one summer in Corsica, 1995. Watch an IndieWire exclusive clip from the film below.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Corsica, 1995. It’s Lesia’s first summer as a teenager. One day a man bursts into her life and takes her to an isolated villa where she finds her father,...