Original title: Dalva
France/Belgium • Drama • Year: 2022 – Running time: 75 mins
Languages: French
Audience Response: 21 slips returned
- ‘Excellent’: 13 votes
- ‘Very Good’: 6 votes
- ‘Good’: 1 vote
- ‘Satisfactory’: 1 vote
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
Read the comments here or visit our “Love According To Dalva” discussion page.
Synopsis:
Dalva, 12, lives alone with her father. One evening, the police storm into their home and takes her into foster care. As Dalva befriends her new roommate Samia and social worker Jayden, she gradually comes to understand the love she shared with her father was not what she thought. With their help, Dalva will learn to become a child again.
First-time feature director Emmanuelle Nicot paints an achingly beautiful portrait of friendship, recovery and identity through a young girl’s childhood sexual abuse story.
Alexandria Slater (Little White Lies)
Director: Emmanuelle Nicot
Writers: Jacques Akchoti • Bulle Decarpentries • Emmanuelle Nicot
Main Cast:
| Zelda Samson | Dalva Keller |
| Alexis Manenti | Jayden Dorkel |
| Fanta Guirassy | Samia |
| Jean-Louis Coulloc’h | Jacques Keller |
| Marie Denarnaud | Zora |
| Sandrine Blancke | Marina (the mother) |
(for full cast list, additional technical information and reviews, please visit the Love According to Dalva pages in IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes)
CFC Film Notes:
Dalva Keller is 12, but dresses and lives like an adult (or, rather, her father’s idealised image of one – lace and cocktail dresses, pearl earrings, heavy make-up, and her hair drawn into a neat chignon). Kept hidden from society by her father (who she calls by his first name) from the age of 5 until rescued by social services, Dalva at first refuses to accept that her father’s actions were abusive and struggles to reconnect with the mother she had been told had abandoned her; whilst also having to learn how to be a child in order to be accepted by others in the emergency children’s shelter and the school she is assigned to. In the shelter, she is placed with a roommate named Samia who has an equally jaundiced (though rather different) view of adult human relationships. (Samia’s mother is a sex-worker who had tried to put her daughter on the game).
In interviews, director Emmanuelle Nicot has described how she researched the screenplay of this, her directorial debut, by spending time in French emergency reception centres dealing with abused children. She also talked to a friend’s father, a teacher who realised that a six-year-old pupil in his class, living alone with her father, had become highly sexualised.
At times an uncomfortable watch, Nicot however treats the subject matter with sensitivity and honesty, without ever resorting to cheap emotional manipulation. By remaining solely within Dalva’s perspective, Nicot circumvents the conventional abuse narrative, giving the character autonomy instead of victimhood. The child actors, including Zelda Samson herself, are non-professionals – Nicot’s direction never attempts to exploit them, and from them she has drawn some exceptional performances.