A host tried to gently usher her to the wings. Finally, she feted her mother with a blessing in Arabic and a celebratory ululation. The very long list of people she thanked included the festival’s artistic director, a man whom Benyamina praised for having “the clitoris” to take a chance on them. Accepting the award from the actor Willem Dafoe, Benyamina mounted the stage with her conspicuously multicultural female cast, and took the opportunity to denounce the dearth of female directors in the business. She is not much for feminine modesty as the manicurist got to work, she told me, “I could tell you I expected all of this, but then I would seem like an asshole.” Last year, “Divines” won the Caméra d’Or for best first film at the Cannes Film Festival.
A few minutes later, a pedicurist arrived to do her toes.īenyamina seemed slightly bemused by her surroundings. “A strong character with natural femininity.” A row of multicolored juices sat untouched on a room-service cart. “She’s a Chloé Girl,” one of the reps told me. Designers at the fashion house Chloé had provided her with a bespoke cream-colored dress for the award ceremony, and tall, blond members of their P.R. (It lost to “Elle,” but has since won three Césars.) Benyamina, who is thirty-seven, has a cataract of long curly hair, the chiselled cheekbones of a terracotta warrior, and the air of a pugilist she is given to quoting the Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire: “Independence isn’t given you have to take it.” She had opened the door to her blandly luxurious suite in a terrycloth bathrobe. We were sitting in a Beverly Hills hotel on the morning of the Golden Globes Benyamina’s début feature film, “Divines,” which is set in the working-class French suburbs, or banlieues, had been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. “We were trained to become good little French boys and girls,” the filmmaker Houda Benyamina said, of growing up in the working-class suburbs of Paris, ”but with none of the tools to do so.” PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN PHILLIPS / GETTY IMAGES FOR BFI