DUBAI: Now a fashionable regular on the Cannes Film Festival red carpet, French-Algerian actress Lyna Khoudri has revealed the release date of her latest film on Instagram, teasing fans with a short clip of the new period drama.
Titled “La place d’une autre,” with the English-language title “Secret Name,” the film will hit theaters on Jan. 19, according to the actress’s post on Instagram Stories.
Directed by Aurélia Georges, Khoudri takes on the lead role of Nelie, who escapes a miserable existence by becoming a frontline nurse in 1914. One day, she takes the identity of Rose, a young woman from a well to do family, who dies in front of her. She meets the wealthy Madame de Lengwil while posing as Rose and begins working for the family, with the lie changing the course of her life forever.
The rising star first gained prominence for her role as Nedjma in Algerian film “Papicha,” in which she played a young design student who was determined to stage a fashion show in protest of the Algeria’s escalating conservatism in the midst of the Civil War.
Director Mounia Meddour’s debut feature premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.
For her work in the film, Khoudri won the Orizzonti Award for Best Actress at the 74th Venice Film Festival and she was nominated in the Cesar Awards’ Most Promising Actress category.
Khoudri would go on to land a number of major roles, notably in Wes Anderson’s critically-lauded “The French Dispatch,” starring Timothee Chalamet, Saoirse Ronan, Tilda Swinton, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe and more.
She played a student activist and Chalamet’s love interest in the live-action film that wowed critics at the 2021 Cannes festival.
The 29-year-old actress is also set to appear in a new two-part adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ classic French novel “The Three Musketeers,” in which she will star opposite Francois Civil as his love interest, taking on the role of Constance D’Artagnan, formerly Bonacieux.
Additionally, the Algeria-born star is shooting “Novembre,” a Cedric Jimenez-directed thriller about the French anti-terrorism services during the hunt for suspects after the 2015 attacks in Paris.
Most recently, Khoudri hit the silver screen in “Haute Couture,” a French film that tells the story of a petite mains named Esther (Nathalie Baye) who, after participating in her last Haute Couture collection for Dior, gets her bag stolen by 20-year-old Jade (Khoudri) at a metro station.
