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.

[22] Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos apologised to Doucouré and the company removed the poster from the platform.

[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.

[25] In November 2022, Variety announced that Doucouré was working on a biopic about Josephine Baker, with Studiocanal producing the film.