By my own rules

This story is taken from the Freedom issue of LOVE magazine. Order a copy here.

It starts as a pressure you cannot name, something inside you pushing to get out. As a teenager, you barely know what to do with it. In 2019, at just twenty-five years old, Fatima Daas put the feeling into words in her novel The Last One (2020), based on her life as a teenager. Something unsettled lives inside her protagonist, a disturbance that refuses to stay hidden. But how to speak it aloud? That is the crux of her story—a young woman caught between her family’s expectations and her first romantic pull toward women, between her faith and her sexuality, between the working-class streets she comes from and the rarefied halls she is heading toward: philosophy lectures, the world of letters, the smart set. How do you navigate all that?

In 2025, actor and director Hafsia Herzi adapted the book for the big screen under the title The Little Sister, and cast Nadia Melliti in the role of Fatima. Melliti had never intended to become an actor, but a casting director happened to cross her path one Saturday afternoon at Châtelet, in the center of Paris and, well, sometimes that’s all it takes to turn a life upside down.

The Little Sister premiered at Cannes’s main competition section to great acclaim. The film earned a Palme d’Or nomination, won the Queer Palm, and received a twelve-minute standing ovation. Nadia Melliti took home the Best Actress award for what critics described as a “gorgeously modulated body-and-soul performance,” and “one of the most auspicious screen debuts in years.” After the festival whirlwind, I met up with Nadia and Fatima. Nadia arrived exactly as she is, a footballer, mysterious, with a gaze at once naïve and bright, her body upright and dignified. Fatima was more guarded, her presence softer and quieter. Yet they found common ground in telling this story

This story is taken from the Freedom issue of LOVE magazine. Order a copy here.

MEHDI MEKLAT Let’s start with dignity—something I feel the story carries so well. What does the word “dignity” mean to you?

NADIA MELLITI For me, dignity is showing who you are on the inside [as honestly as possible] and owning it. It’s not the same as pride—pride is full of ego, and I’m not into that. But you’re right, Fatima’s character has something both dignified and very modest about her.

FATIMA DAAS I agree. Dignity is refusing to compromise and refusing to play the game of a system that grinds you down. My duty in literature is to break the silence and make stories exist that people would rather erase, by telling them from the inside. It’s a strong statement of our existence.

MM Is dignity something you’re born with?

NM I don’t think it’s innate—you build it over a lifetime. Above all, it’s respect for yourself and for others. I think I learned that from my parents, my brothers and sisters, and also at school.

MM Let’s now go back to your school years. What kind of student were you?

NM I was always a good student until I got to university. At uni, you go through a real shift in identity, you’re no longer in your teenage phase. In middle school, I was looking for a group to belong to. I wanted to identify with other people, but it wasn’t easy. My friends were very feminine, they got their nails done every week, talked about beauty products. I couldn’t find my place in that world. We didn’t have the same interests or the same lives. I preferred playing football with the boys in the yard. And even if I don’t like the word, my “difference” was a strength.

MM Playing football with the boys. Who won?

NM Me, obviously. I wiped the floor with them. I’ve always got along better with guys; we have more in common. We talk about sport, about competitions. With girls, it’s different. They’re more into “matcha mode” [laughs].

MM Would you call yourselves rebels? FD About being a rebel… It reminds me of the writer Mehdi Charef. When my book came out, he invited me [to speak on a panel] along with [the writer] Akli Tadjer, and told the audience: “At this table there are two Arabs and one rebel.”

NM Me, definitely. I’ve never liked the norm. I’m drawn to anything offbeat. I think I got that from sports. As a kid I played what people called a boys’ sports—football. Even though it’s more accepted for girls now, ten years ago it wasn’t. A girl who played football was automatically a tomboy. At eleven, I made my choice clear. It was football or nothing.

MM What made you want to play?

NM My family. My older brothers were obsessed with football, and so was my dad. In Romainville, where I grew up, a small town in Seine-Saint-Denis, there were loads of older guys who played. I wanted to grow up fast so I could join them. Little by little, they let me in, even though they were much older than me.

MM At the time, who was your favourite player?

NM Cristiano Ronaldo. I loved his free kicks, his celebrations, but most of all his perseverance. I really identified with him. His speeches made me want to be disciplined, rigorous, and consistent. When you are young you are not necessarily like that, so I needed someone who was. He really helped me. And he is a very dignified player. He commands respect through his work without showing off. I am like Ronaldo, I am in it for the long game.

MM Like him, you are also very sporty and competitive. What is your relationship with failure?

NM That is a heavy question [laughs]. Let’s say failure and I are friends. I am not scared of it. I have been through it plenty of times. Of course, the first time I thought I would never get back up. At university I had to repeat a year for the first time. When that happens, your confidence takes a huge hit, even if you are lucky enough to be supported by the people around you. But you inevitably question yourself. You ask yourself if you should just give up. School conditions us: it is success or nothing. But the system is deeply unequal. Not everyone has the same cultural background or the same comfort to study. I think that is why I want to be a PE teacher, to make people want to do sports in a way that is encouraging and accessible.

MM What about you, Fatima, what kind of football player are you?

FD Honestly, I do not think I am competitive. I have always hated being put in competition. And I am terrible at football.

MM Nadia, when you won the Award for Best Actress at Cannes, I thought, this girl was discovered through a street casting, she goes to Cannes with her first film and wins the top prize—that is wild. Did you feel like you were in competition there?

NM At first, not at all. I did not know anything, I was not paying attention. But later, when I got home, I thought, damn, I was in competition with the biggest actors.

MM How did you prepare your speech?

NM Honestly, I did not prepare for it at all because I arrived late to the ceremony. I had to catch a flight from Paris, then take a moto-taxi from Nice to Cannes. Quite the mission. Once we got to Nice, the police escorted us straight to Cannes. It was one of my favourite moments of the festival [laughs]. I arrived at the last minute and had no time to prepare anything.

MM All actors seem to cry when they get that prize, but you did not.

NM Was I supposed to? No, but my throat was tight. I was taken over by shyness, modesty, [and] excitement too. And a fair bit of stage fright in front of such a massive audience.

MM So you won at Cannes before winning the Champions League.

NM I do not want to compare, but the League is still better [laughs].

MM Does fame scare you?

NM Honestly, it is all new to me. I have no real connection to fame. My only question is whether I will manage to combine sports, cinema, and my personal life. Other than that, I am very attached to my anonymity.

MM Is there a question you would like to ask Fatima?

NM Yes. I would like to know how she manages to stand her ground in a society where it is so hard to assert who you are. And also, who [did] she look up to when she was younger as a figure of freedom?

FD For me, writing is a form of protection. It is being able to use words to speak, to break free from the dominant gaze. When writing this book, I wanted to show a character who does not corrupt herself and who is not looking, through her coming out, for parental validation to live her homosexuality. I think that is a kind of freedom. As for figures of freedom, I would say they are above all people from my own life: my sisters and my mother.

MM And you, Nadia? Did you look up to anyone?

NM I liked the singer Nâdiya [laughs]. First, she had the same name as me, and in one of her music videos she is in a boxing ring playing with masculine codes, like she is going to war. In general I like figures of freedom who fight for something, people who do not let society’s norms push them around.

MM Can freedom be passed on?

NM No, you earn it. Freedom is an intrinsic drive to do what you want to do. For me, I learned freedom through football. I could not have done it any other way. But freedom is a fight, and like in any fight, there are winners and losers.

MM The Last One is also a story of emancipation. At one point, Fatima leaves her original world and goes to university. She changes scenery.

FD When the character arrives at the philosophy department, she experiences it as a change of worlds, with new codes and new questions. But for me, that change is never a break from her background. I did not want to tell a classic story of class escape. What interests me is understanding what happens inside her in this new environment, questioning new norms, facing class contempt and racism, and learning, little by little, to arm herself against those realities.

MM Nadia, do you feel deeply free?

NM No, not at all. No one is really free from themselves. We are always part of a framework, an institution, a system that limits our freedoms. And being free, is it only obeying yourself? I think of Georges Moustaki’s song “Ma Liberté,” which is in the film. For me, freedom is doing something that makes me happy, without other people. That is it. Freedom is doing things without others, without rules, without orders, without lack of means. That is why I love birds so much. They go where they want, they live their lives.

MM Which bird would you be?

NM Any of them. Even a pigeon is fine by me [laughs].

Hair ALEXANDRY COSTA at ARTLIST, Makeup MARIE DUFRESNE at FUTURE, Set Design ALICE JACOBS at WALTER SCHUPFER MANAGEMENT, Photography Assistant CHRISTOPH LANGENBERG, Fashion Assistants SHAOUL AVITAL and CARLOTA VIVES GINÉS, Set Design Assistant ROSEMARY BROWNING, Production KITTEN PRODUCTION