It’s been seven years since Cate Blanchett led 82 women up the red carpet in protest at the male dominance of the world’s biggest film festival. Some progress has been made since then — the number of female Palme d’Or winners has tripled in the meantime — but Cannes is still a long way from gender parity. But though the numbers aren’t there yet (there are just seven female directors in Competition this year), the dial is moving in different and very welcome ways, bringing in new types of female-fronted stories.

The Little Sister is French actress Hafsia Herzi’s third feature, but it has the freshness of a debut, which sounds like a back-handed compliment but actually isn’t. Adapting Fatima Daas’s semi-autobiographical 2022 novel The Last One, the story of a young gay Muslim woman’s sexual awakening, Herzi confidently takes what could have been a traditional...