15-year-old Lesia was expecting a carefree summer. Instead, she is thrown into a whirlwind of mafia conflicts when a local politician is killed in an attack. It turns out that her father was the intended target. Despite the growing danger and increasing tension, Lesia has no intention of leaving her father’s side.

The film had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regards competition at Cannes

Film expert recommends

The first feature-length film from the French director and photographer, whose credits include a series and a documentary about a well-known Chinese artist who shares his passion for photography. In Kingdom, he tells the story of the Corsican mafia of the 1990s in a realistic, or rather: naturalistic style, typical of some of the new cinema from the Seine. Corsica, nominally a French island, is largely populated by a population feeling strongly about its cultural and political independence, which, especially during the period described by the film, contributed to an eruption of violence. Colonna depicts it through the example of a mafia family, making central the mutual affection between a 15-year-old daughter and a father who becomes increasingly entangled in criminal relationships. She reinforces the credibility of her story by involving non-professional actors in the main, describing paranoia, violence, constant escape and – authentic feelings – that force the viewer to get involved in this tangle of bad circumstances. If one looks for analogies in recent years, a good equivalent film would be David Michôd’s Australian Animal Kingdom (2010).

Jacek Nowakowski