SHE MINCES INTO the world with her highlights and her backless lace frock, all the bits and bobs of feminine je-ne-sais-quoi perfectly in place. She’s totally unaware of how crazily anomalous she is to her peers. She’s been made into a monster, but she’s too young to understand this. Meet Dalva (Zelda Samson). She’s 12. Hers is the complex tale of grooming in Love According to Dalva co-written and directed by Emmanuelle Nicot, on this year’s European Film Festival, online for free and at cinemas in Johannesburg and Cape Town, from 10 until 20 October 2024.

The gift of this film is in the young performer herself. Zelda Samson was just 10 when she started working on this film, which debuted in 2022. It’s a devastatingly subtle reflection on grooming, where an older person moulds a very young one, in fulfilment of sex fantasies. This film conveys a level of extreme discomfort, but never lowers itself to cheap tricks for the audience, tricks which might be misconstrued as titillating.

Dalva’s presence on set is like that of a self-defensive little flower, not even yet in bud. She is unable to smile because she is so ill at ease in a suddenly new world of a safe house, which contains rambunctious and naughty teens. It’s a place where she can’t apply her mascara without being laughed at, and where people know more of her story than she understands. She thinks she is a beautiful woman. She has been forced to lose the innocent playfulness and carefree wildness of her childhood. And the perpetrator? Her father (Jean-Louis Coulloc’h).

Dalva is a tale of incest and confused love, but it’s also about friendship, featuring Fanta Guirassy as Dalva’s first – and subsequently best – real pal. It’s about the messed up narrative of justification of the perpetrator’s whose voice and influence will continue playing on an internal ‘tape recorder’ in the sensibilities of the young victim, perhaps forever. In a sense, this film’s denouement feels too easy. Grooming is as complicated a psychopathic and sexual crime as sex addiction, and like sex addiction, one too easily misunderstood or allowed to slip by. Incest is on a level of taboo that arguably surpasses even murder.

But there’s more. Like films of the ilk of Volcker Schlöndorff’s Tin Drum of 1979, Dalva features a very young performer in a very provocative role. Here she is the victim of easily one of the worst kinds of lines that can be crossed in sexual crime. Might this performer be damaged by the residue of what interpreting Dalva Keller leaves on her soul?

In this particular film one wants to fast forward in the life of this young woman to see how she has, indeed, recognised that damage and confronted it. We are left with her at an uncomfortable sense of peace, with her monster incarcerated, but is he still in her heart? In her sense of what beauty looks like? You have to withhold your appreciation of how pretty you might think she is, in context. A beautifully made yet difficult to watch piece.

• Love According to Dalva is directed by Emmanuelle Nicot and features a cast headed by Hugo Bariller, Delphine Bibet, Sandrine Blancke, Trancillia Bokungu, Cédric Bossuyt, Jean-Louis Coulloc’h, Gilles David, Eva Azevedo de Sousa, Marie Denarnaud, Charlie Drach, Alain Eloy, Fanta Guirassy, Roman Coustère Hachez, Didier Jacquier, Mehdi Lecomte, Joséphine Lucic, Yasmina Maïza, Alexis Manenti, Michela Marasco, Romane Mouval, Diego Murgia, Anne-Laure Penninck, Babetida Sadjo, Zelda Samson, Maia Sandoz, Abdelmounim Snoussi, Zaire Souchi, Stéphane Undreiner and Lysa Caugy Vonville. Written by Emmanuelle Nicot in collaboration with Jacques Akchoti and Bulle Decarpentries, it is produced by Julie Esparbes and Delphine Schmit and features creative input by Frederic Alvarez (music), Caroline Guimbal (cinematography), Suzana Pedro (editing) and Constance Allain (costumes). In French with English subtitles, it is part of the 11^th European Film Festival South Africa, screening at The Zone in Rosebank Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and online, 10-20 October 2024.