In three films released over a seven-year period – Naissance des pieuvres [Water Lilies] (2007), Tomboy (2011), and Bande de filles [Girlhood] (2014) – Céline Sciamma crafted a coming-of-age trilogy that established her reputation as one of the most important and compelling directors working in French cinema today. Beyond their common focus on coming-of-age narratives, the three films share a recognizable set of authorial signatures that articulate the desires, worldview, and sensations of their young female protagonists: a strong, stylized use of colour, a minimalist and emotive (electronic) soundtrack as well as an unobtrusive, observational style of camerawork (often employing plan séquence [‘sequence shots’]) to capture the naturalistic performances of the young actors.

Whilst maintaining the first two films’ focus on questions of gender, belonging, and the fluidity of identity, Sciamma's third and final instalment of the trilogy, Bande de filles, differs in at least two crucial respects. Firstly, it shifts the focus away from queer protagonists (the awakening of lesbian desire in Naissance des pieuvres and the blurring of gender boundaries in Tomboy) to foreground a quartet of adolescent girls whose ‘other-ness’ is as much defined by their blackness as it is by their sexuality or gender fluidity. Secondly, Bande de filles moves away from the more comfortable (and largely white) middle-class suburbs that provide the locations for Naissance des pieuvres and Tomboy to the disadvantaged cités of the Parisian banlieue that have, since at least the early 1980s, functioned as a shorthand in French cinema for symbolic spaces of exclusion and alterity.

Released in France almost 20 years after Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine [‘Hate’] (1995) had brought a ‘new’ genre to the attention of audiences in France and abroad, Bande de filles confirmed the longevity of the banlieue film while redefining its focus. With relatively few exceptions – La Squale [‘The Shark’] (Genestal and Lavant, 2000), Jeunesse dorée [‘Golden Youth’] (Ghorab-Volta, 2001), L'Esquive [Games of Love and Chance] (Kechiche, 2005), and, most recently, Divines (Benyamina, 2016) – the banlieue film has been the domain of marginalized male youth. Bande de filles is thus significant for the way it explores the worldview of young female protagonists but also for the fact that it foregrounds an almost all-black cast, where earlier banlieue films tended to focus either on Maghrebi-French or multiethnic banlieue youth.