Decadence shines when this pastry chef beats life’s odds in ‘Sugar and Stars’
Stellar performance by Just Riadh elevates the true story
“Sugar and Stars” is screening in Boulder this weekend as part of the Boulder International Film Festival.
Starring Algerian-born actor Riadh Belaïche, 25, who moved to France at age 8, the 2023 film “Sugar and Stars” is based on the inspiring real-life story of renowned chef Yazid Ichemrahen, who fell in love with making pastries as a young French-moroccan boy.
Belaïche, also known by his pseudonym Just Riadh, gained fame via social media and Youtube videos as a teenager. In “Sugar and Stars ” —his first motion picture in a lead role and a departure from his career in web series and TV — Belaïche delivers a riveting performance displaying impressive range and maturity, ensuring a film that could have been a flufffilled pop exercise instead more than adequately takes audiences on Yazid Ichemrahen’s complex and unforgettable journey from a painful, turbulent childhood to worldwide acclaim.
“Sugar and Stars,” which critics are calling Belaïche’s breakthrough performance, begins with the line “I entered this world through a door no one wanted to open.”
The younger version of Yazid (played beautifully by Marwan Amesker), steals ingredients from a small grocery store to attempt his first solo Black Forest cake, which Belaïche — as the teenage Yazid — later makes an exquisite version of, on the spot, to save himself from being fired from a lowlevel kitchen job at a fancy restaurant.
Slowly, important figures start to recognize the teenage Yazid as a dessertmaking savant, but his experience of being bounced between a loving foster family (that inspired his fascination with desserts) and his troubled mother — who lies about her relationship with him to get money, insults and mostly abandons him — continually gets in the way of earning an education or keeping a job.
When Yazid is arrested for nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time and possessing an envelope of cash he’d made while working at the boarding school he attends, his mother picks him up and can only offer sympathy for herself.
“Why is this happening to me?” she says. “You have to thank me.”
She repeatedly calls Yazid an “idiot” and he runs away, crying, wondering why — with his biological father nowhere to be found — the one birth parent who could be his rock would keep hurting him.
A teacher at the boarding school, which he travels over 100 miles from each day to work at the high-class restaurant, recognizes Yazid’s debilitating trauma and advocates for him when administrators consider expulsion.
“Yazid goes, I go,” the teacher says, and Yazid convinces his foster family to break the school’s rules by secretly picking him up so he can enter a chocolate-making contest. While he’s feverishly working on a chocolate sculpture, Yazid is interrupted suddenly by his mother, who calls him “stupid” and shames him for not wanting to see her; she pleads with him that she never meant to hurt his brother, that it was just an accident (we don’t learn what happened to
On the heels of 2022’s Academy Award-nominated “Tár,” with Cate Blanchett, and 2023’s Academy Award-nominated “Maestro,” with Bradley Cooper, the 2023 documentary “Maestra” provides real-life perspective for a profession that’s suddenly prolific on the silver screen.
The film, a directorial debut by Maggie Contreras, follows five women from around the world as they travel to Paris to compete in the only female conductor competition — La Maestra.
A strong directorial effort from Contreras, many of the shots of the maestras at work with their orchestras bring the viewer right into the concert hall. However, with five women trying to share center stage in an 88-minute film, some of the story arcs feel underdeveloped or that the narrative is oversaturated.
Regardless, there is a clear intention to depict these women as more than contestants competing against one another. They are mothers and wives and individuals, driven to excel in their field while grappling with its unwelcoming nature — less than 3% of the world’s orchestras are led by women, according to the doc.
From constantly having to travel for freelance jobs to debating whether to start a family, from fleeing abuse at the hands of an instructor and relocating to a new country to grappling with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, each woman made sacrifices to attend this prestigious competition