VIFF’s annual Spotlight on France contains some pretty thorny items this time around. Titles like the starkly satirical In the Shadow of Women (October 4 and 5), the bizarrely abstract Portrait of the Artist (October 2 and 3), and even the teen musical We Did It on a Song (October 5 and 7) look at changing class and gender roles in a France under increasing pressure from without and within.

Intriguingly, one of the most challenging films is also one of the most seemingly easygoing. The harmonious urban surfaces (with a notable lack of drugs and violence) and frequently sun-dappled cinematography of My Friend Victoria (screening October 1 and 3) belie a roiling critique of French identity politics.

To make his eighth feature in almost two decades (Young Girls in Black was the most recent), writer-director Jean-Paul Civeyrac adapted a Doris Lessing novella called Victoria and the Stavenys. He took the 2003 tale of an orphaned daughter of black African parents from ’90s London and moved it to present-day Paris. But he kept the basic trajectory, about a girl (played as an adult by memorable newcomer Guslagie Malanga), Victoria, who forms a lifetime attachment—from a kind of quietly obsessive distance—with a family of well-to-do white liberals.

“Well, really it could be any great western city,” Civeyrac says, in French, on the line from his home in Paris. (We should mention that the conversation was facilitated by Paris-based Vancouverite Lori Thicke, founder of the nonprofit Translators Without Borders.) “There are differences between big cities, but I thought I could transpose the story without losing anything. I make films in France, of course, but I wanted to talk about the problems raised in the book specifically to the French.”

One thing he did leave out is the story’s religious content.

“The responses in the original are very English, and the real problems that foreigners have in adapting to France are really not about religion. Journalists focus on religion but everyday people do not. I wanted the film to be a kind of mirror for the people of France, who still have not quite grasped their own colonial history and its consequences.”

He also maintained the tale’s literary quality by having it narrated off-screen by Victoria’s best friend, Fanny, here played by Nadia Moussa, also new to movies.

“I invented that part,” admits the director, who will attend his new film’s second screening here. “Doris Lessing had Fanny as a character, but I wanted to shift the focus and have her tell the story, to show that a black woman from a poor immigrant background could write a book and succeed in modern France.”

Although the film’s narrator is assimilated and deeply French in values and language—which sometimes recalls the belle époque realism of Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola—she remains almost invisible. The focus stays fixed on Victoria, who has no real interests and ambitions beyond the inchoate yearning that sets in on her first visit to the spacious flat of the family here called the Savinets.

“It’s clear that whatever she does, she will somehow remain outside of society,” Civeyrac concludes. “She’s a poetic figure of foreignness, floating through the world—home, but never really at home.”