Divertimento

Zahia Ziouani and her twin sister Fettouma grow up in Seine-Saint-Denis on the edge of Paris. Zahia wants to conduct; Fettouma plays the cello. Zahia gets into a good conservatoire and finds herself alone there: a woman, of Algerian descent, from the suburbs. Nobody sees her as a conductor. In the end she founds her own orchestra and calls it Divertimento. Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar directs. Oulaya Amamra plays Zahia and Lina El Arabi plays Fettouma. The story is real. Zahia Ziouani is a well known conductor in France today, and the Divertimento orchestra really was founded in Seine-Saint-Denis, with the aim of opening classical music to that area and to musicians coming from outside the conservatoire system. The question at the centre is access rather than talent. What stands in Zahia's way is not an inability to work but that nobody will hand her an orchestra, and the narrative keeps pressing that distinction. The conducting scenes are the strongest material. Amamra genuinely trained for it and the orchestral passages hold. It reached a wide audience in France and was shown particularly in schools. Who it is for: viewers who like true stories, classical music and films about class. Who it is not for: the narrative never leaves the biopic template and the obstacles are cleared in turn, in the expected order.