This was a very haunting coming-of-age story that stayed with me for a while. Parts of it reminded of Augusten Burroughs’ memoir ‘Running With Scissors,’ which, similar to this film, is also a Bildungsroman about the growing pains of a young man who is trying to deal with his mother’s insanity, as well as the judgments of the people surrounding him. However,I thought ‘17 Rue Bleue’ states its difference through its modern and thought-provoking themes, such as immigration and the culture-clash, that inevitably follows immigration. Shown entirely from the point of young Samir, A French-Algerian living in Modern France, the movie brings forth the crucial and very real-to-life dilemmas of these people who are often invisible or stereotyped in many of the contemporary European films. People who liked this movie should also most definitely read Faiza Guene’s debut novel, ‘Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow.’ Already a big hit in Europe; this semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of Doria, a young Algerian-French girl living alone with her mother in Paris’ dangerous and slum-like housing projects. Though, regardless of all these dramatic conditions, writer Guene still manages to write an uplifting and often hilarious first-person narration of a girl’s Bildungsroman novel, which was compared to anything from the Bridget Jones’ Diary to the France’s most controversial and successful movie about the life on projects, ‘La Haine.’