Maïmouna Doucouré
[8][9][10] During the 2017 Cesar Award ceremony, she reflected her painful experiences of being a black, Muslim female director while working in a white male dominated film industry.[11] She penned the script for her debut feature film Cuties in early 2017 taking her life experience as a refugee girl into account.[18] It was revealed that Doucouré spent nearly 18 months researching studies how young and pre-teen children are being exposed to 18+ adult content and sexualised images on social media in order to showcase the accurate reality in the film.[20] The social media outrage culminated in a petition claiming it "sexualizes an 11-year-old for the viewing pleasure of paedophiles" attracting 25,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.[23] In September 2020, in an interview hosted by French organisation UniFrance, she reflected that the film became controversial primarily due to Netflix's selection of artwork.