The hashtag #NetflixPedofilia (Netflix Paedophilia) has become a global trend this afternoon after the streaming giant announced the next premiere of the movie «Cuties», accompanied by images accused of hyper sexualizing the protagonists, four minors.
Netflix has just announced the premiere of «Cuties» for September 9, the film by Maïmouna Doucouré, a French-Senegalese director, would deal with an 11-year-old girl who together with her friends perform dance choreographies, the controversy started due to the description of the platform where it read, «Amy is 11 years old and wants to belong to a group of girls her age who dance sensually.»
Internet users have not missed Netflix’s serious mistake, and have created the hashtag #NetflixPedofilia, which so far has more than 60 thousand tweets, this would have worried the company, as it decided to change the description of the film to «Amy has 11 years old and she is amazed at a group of girls dance”, something that also caused great criticism, since the little 11 years old are girls, not girls.
Among the criticisms, users also condemned the images shared for the promotion of the film, where the four minors are seen with adult poses, on the other hand, it has been questioned that the film is focused on twerking -a Caribbean dance – considering that the dance has sensual movements that should not be practiced by children.
The film is actually a criticism of current society and the restrictions of the Muslim religion, the cover released by Netflix would not be the original, the company would have made its own images in order to publicize the production.
Cuties would tell the story of an immigrant Senegalese girl, who lives alone with her mother because her father leaves the family to marry another woman, the 11-year-old girl just wants to be popular, she joins a group of girls who dance twerking, and a social network to achieve its purpose.
Maïmouna Doucouré would have taken inspiration from real cases, the director assured in an interview for Cineuropa that she collected testimonies from girls for more than a year, “I found that very young girls had 400,000 followers on social networks and I was trying to understand why. There was no particular reason, except the fact that they had posted sexy or nude photos: that’s what got them ‘fame’ ”.
In the same interview, Doucouré expressed his discomfort at the sexualization of childhood and how minors are vulnerable to it due to ignorance, “Today, the sexier a woman is, the more she is perceived as an object and the more value she has for social networks. And when you are 11 years old, you do not understand all these mechanisms well, but you have a tendency to imitate, to do the same to obtain a similar result. It seems to me that it is urgent to talk about it, to open a debate on the subject ”.