“You Resemble Me” Director Dina Amer On Telling The Story of Hasna Ait Boulahcen
The ex-journalist goes on a years-long journey of redemption by bringing to the big screen the story of a woman she once mistakenly branded a terrorist
Egyptian-American born first-time director Dina Amer is a force to be reckoned with. A recovering journalist; as she commonly refers to herself, Dina’s debut film, You Resemble Me, stormed through the documentary and fictional film world, winning over 30 awards, and debuting at the 78th Venice International Film Festival to critical acclaim. The movie recounts the story of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a 26-year-old French woman of Moroccan descent, who was radicalised by the Islamic State and was widely believed to be Europe’s first female suicide bomber. A claim Dina first reported on but soon after discovered was untrue. From that point on, Dina sets out to right her wrong by finding Hasna’s family and convincing them to allow her to tell the real story of Hasna. Through the years-long process of bringing the story to the big screen, Dina discovered that there were many ways in which her life mirrored that of Hasna’s. Even the title of the film is a nod to how Hasna’s mother recognised her daughter in the director. And in the end, the film became a journey of self-discovery as well as a mission. A mission to tell the truth and to use the power of storytelling to heal. The film is a poignant, heartfelt, and often eerie portrayal of a young woman’s destiny at the hands of injustice.
Before this incredible film came about, you were a journalist for Vice World News. How and why did you decide to become a journalist in the first place?
Growing up, I would see these women in their element, on the field and in dangerous areas, fearlessly at the centre of where history was unfolding. I thought that was so magical and powerful. Truth, from a young age, was very, very attractive [to me]. I thought that was my life’s path; to be a war correspondent, in the thick of where the human condition was, where people were really being whittled down to truth, [where] there was no space for pretending. I’m not the smartest person, but I have courage and I have compassion and I will go to the darkest corners of humanity and try to bring a candle to try and understand something, try to transform the dark into light. Over time, I got wildly disenchanted by the news as a medium, and found it to be incredibly fictitious, sensational, and problematic. I was not proud of my work. I felt like I had no story, my story was chasing after other stories, and yet they were reduced to these very simplistic and even sometimes racist worldviews. [Like] the news networks that are meant to be the Mecca of truth telling, were the custodians of certain worldviews that need to be protected, and if you did challenge that, they would kind of undermine you and say, “Well, who are you? Who are you to [question us?]
With Hasna, why did you feel like you had to rectify that wrongdoing of false news?
I reported that Hasna was the first female suicide bomber for Vice News. And I was shaken by the headline, and how it caused this ripple effect throughout the neighbourhood, France, and the world. She was young, 26 years old, and was known as a party girl. Not someone who you would think is carrying the banner of Islam. And yet, suddenly, she was the representative for a Muslim woman. I was horrified for women in France and in that particular neighbourhood. At the time, they were already living in an incredibly difficult circumstance in France with so much racism. Trying to do anything in the public sphere when you are visibly Muslim means you will not be accepted by French society – so, they’re already in a highly precarious position. I don’t wear the hijab, but I’m Muslim and I love being Muslim. Islam, for me, is my lifeline. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have prayer. I don’t know what I would do or why I would do it. Maybe on the surface, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, she’s Muslim”. But still, I would see how people would treat me differently. So, I feel like in France, young people are gravitating towards being visibly Muslim as an act of protest. That’s all Hasna was doing – not what I had reported.
You felt you had to tell the story to rectify feeding into the stereotype?
I was drawn to go find her family because I just wanted to know who she was. I thought, “Who is this girl who has shaken the French soil so violently?” She’s kind of an enigmatic human being. She’s this cowgirl and she’s kind of a hustler. I could see myself in her a little bit. Her mother turned away every single journalist, but she let me in because she told me I resembled her daughter, which is really chilling. Honestly, I don’t think I chose so much to tell the story, this story chose me. I was completely swallowed whole by it. I had no choice but to keep going, beyond logic, beyond what was good for my mental health.
You could have done a corrective news bulletin, but you chose to make an entire film, fictionally told but with factual elements. Why did you choose the medium of film to tell this story?
By this point, I had been very disenchanted by the news, and I felt like I wanted to tell real stories, but through a different format, because I knew that the problem with the news model is that it was stripping people of their humanity, reducing them to stereotypes or headlines: A victim. A perpetrator. A statistic. So here we were, flooded with stories in the newspapers about people we didn’t really know. I felt like we needed to find a way to speak with nuance about the complexity of who they are as human beings. I think that cinema is like a body-swapping mechanism, you go into the theatre, and the rest of the world disappears. And you are almost in that person’s body, you feel their fragility, you feel their quiet moments, you see yourself in them. Someone who’s ultimately a stranger, becomes you. That’s powerful and has the capacity to change you as a person and change certain preconceived notions you had about others. The dehumanisation of the news is rectified through the humanisation of cinema, I believe.
You cover class, race, religion, radicalisation, and terrorism throughout the film. If you could pick the core thing you wanted to portray, what would that be?
There’s a few things. I think that undealt with trauma can make you dangerous – to yourself and others. It gives way to dissociation, and when we dissociate, we’re capable of doing things that we’re not fully aware of, and maybe are not in our best interests or the interests of others and, that’s what can be dangerous. I think there’s an emphasis on mental health [in the film] and that we have a responsibility to ourselves as a society, to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves. How can we build healthier societies where people are actually taken care of mentally? I think that’s really the route as to why people don’t feel well. They were made to feel invisible in their pain, so they grab your attention in the worst way possible. I wanted people to leave this film with softer hearts towards whoever they may think is the problem.
You chose to put yourself in the film. What was the decision behind that? Was there an element of catharsis, seeing as you’ve spoken about seeing yourself in Hasna?
It was a very visceral connection that I had to Hasna. I am also a woman who’s Muslim and Arab and lives in the west and traversing this identity of feeling that I don’t really belong anywhere, and that I am a walking contradiction. I also have a certain amount of trauma that’s left me with quite jagged pieces inside of me and for a very long time my trauma unfortunately kind of defined me. Also, the whole means of access to this world was built on this point of resemblance between myself and her, that the family really authenticated. There was a deep sense of catharsis and stepping into her shoes that I needed for myself, there was a part of me that could relate to her, which was that she was a wounded martyr, that kind of almost romanticised death. I felt like her, I too can run directly towards the fire and if fire swallows me up, it’s okay because I don’t feel so good here anyways. I could relate to that deeply, which is why I made the film to be honest. It mirrored something inside of me that I had to unravel.
No one knows your healing through the film except for you, or people that really know you…
All I knew was the struggle making this film. Everything was hard and so uphill. From the casting, to getting access, to writing, to walking away from an Amazon deal, losing the money, moving in with my younger sister and her basically bankrolling me with her internship money. The weight of this story, the trauma, the pain, the pain of the family, the pain of Hasna… it’s so dense and it took years. All in all, six long years. I have grey hair! I was a fresh-faced kid before, it aged me.
But the film was also like therapy, in its own way?
For a long time, everyone who knew me thought it was just destroying me. My brother, my mum, my friends. They thought I had lost my mind to it. But you must not lose faith. I realised that with filmmaking it’s not about who’s the most talented, it’s about who has the stamina and the faith to put one foot in front of the other, because it’s hard to cross that line. And you feel like, “Is this even going to happen? Have I wasted years of my life? Does this mean something? Does it not? Does anyone care?” Then at some point, this gust of wind comes in, a grace from God; like a shower of mercy that propels you forward. You find yourself saying, “Okay, this appears to be moving.” And when it does, you realise you have this new reservoir, an expanded capacity within you and it can lift you out of the struggle, and the fragility, and it’s a blessing. Art is such a powerful conduit to light. It’s a spiritual practice. And I think it’s a conduit to healing for yourself and for others. If you approach it with that intentionality of really wanting to serve, it becomes a sacred journey. But, you know, buckle up!
It’s a French film, with French actors, in France. What are the challenges that come with that?
I was so obsessed and passionate and driven by the story I just didn’t see the obstacles. I thought “Oh, I don’t speak French. Doesn’t matter. I understand the truth of the story.” Because truth transcends language. Truth is on a vibrational level. You could be speaking in a different language than me right now but looking into your eyes, I know if you’re being honest or not, I know how it makes me feel. That’s the real communication. It doesn’t matter that I don’t speak French, because I know this woman and I know the crevices of who she is and what she’s dealing with and what her true wound was and was from, and because of that I can douse myself in her world.
And her family still trusted you even though you didn’t speak the French language?
They trusted me more because I didn’t speak French. I spoke Arabic and I was Muslim. And I was a woman that resembled their daughter. So, I was an insider, and, where I needed to be an outsider willing to learn. If I were French, I would never touch this story. Because I had distance and space to learn, that’s why I was drawn. But also, on a core level of being a Muslim woman in the west and trying to traverse that kind of third-culture kid and identity complex. You don’t feel like you belong here, east, or west or to Islam. Everywhere you look, there’s pressure and expectations, especially on us as Muslim women, how we dress, how we act, there’s so much patrolling. White men have been going to the Middle East for a long time, they tell stories about different cultures that they’re not part of, they have no bloodline relationship or language relation to and yet they’re allowed to write definitive literature on it, right? Why can’t we do that?
Why did you think this film would be successful?
I knew the power of the story, how it took up such a space in my life. And I knew that it was this epic story that people just needed to understand. I was this woman who understood this woman who had lost her sense of who she was. And she was navigating this world, appearing to be a whole person, but with this bleeding heart, leaving a trail of blood. She had to grab our attention one way or the other. I thought that story is the terror that she’s wrapped up in.
Why did you decide to release it independently?
There was this message to me, across the journey, saying “Hey, you can either take the studio deal and make something that is palatable in a commercial sense, or you can go cowgirl style and make it your own.” And for me, you can’t escape who you are, right? For better or for worse, at least at this point in my life, I have to listen to my own drumbeat. On one hand, this film became an anomaly because there was so much great prestige and success around it, which I’m very grateful for [but so much resistance, too]. We went to Venice, but we were one of the most contested films. The programme director told me that we almost didn’t get in because a lot of people were afraid of negative reactions. Why? The Jeffrey Dahmer story is the number one show on Netflix, there’s too many films about Ted Bundy and a million murder stories. Hasna didn’t kill anybody, she didn’t pull the trigger, but they didn’t like that we were humanising a supposed terrorist. But I am lucky as along the journey I met people like Ariella Mastroianni at Angelika Theatres who was one of the first people to take a chance on me and book the film across the country. Women like her are a godsend in helping in a world where indie filmmakers feel so alone.
How does the success of this film impact you going forward?
I’m going to continue to tell stories and make other films and push the envelope on the aesthetic, on the story subject itself, on the filmmaking, on all levels. I believe that we have a duty to reflect truth and to reflect it in a way that has never been done before.
What did you learn about yourself making this film?
I learned that stories choose people, that there are so many billion people in this world, but only you can tell your story, so if you second guess yourself, it’s a disservice to the film. You must trust your instincts and lean into them. I remember while I was making this film, I thought, “it’s going to be a great film in spite of me.” I had such low self-esteem and impostor syndrome. I would think “who am I to make a film?” but then I realised, I’m making it because I’m so passionate about it. And no one cares as much as I do. So, I have to be the captain of the ship. But I was also really lacking confidence in myself. Through making this film, I really got to experience that I have something to offer and express. That I have to trust the river that runs through me. Not anyone else’s. But mine.
Photography: Zac Stone, Morgan Miller. Producers: Abel Daniel, Alexandra Van Zant. Stylist: Donté McGuine. Jeweler: Julian Polak of Maison Spoiled. Hair: Rachel Polycarpe. Make Up: Shannon Rodriguez. Lead / Lighting Assistant : Madison Claire Baker. Assistants: Maria Harrington, Haejin Kim, Siyria Witchawut. Post Production/ Retouch: Alexandra Van Zant, Zac Stone. Behind the Scenes: Nick Dorazio. Location: Village East by Angelika.
Special Thanks to The Angelika Film Center New York, staff, and team at the Village East and to Oona Ston
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s April 2023 issue.