believe stories choose people,” says Dina Amer, explaining why she spent six difficult years making a film about the woman dubbed “Europe’s first female suicide bomber”. She adds: “I never would have chosen this story in a million years.”, did not, in fact, blow herself up. She was in an apartment raided by French police in November 2015, shortly after the Islamist terror attacks on the Bataclan nightclub, the Stade de France and other Paris locations that killed 137 people.
The result, Amer’s first film, is You Resemble Me. Its title refers to the director’s own feelings, but also Boulahcen’s close bond with her younger sister, Mariam. At the start of the film, the two – played by real-life sisters Lorenza and Ilonna Grimaudo – are thick as thieves, escaping from their mother and living almost feral in the Paris suburbs. But they are rounded up by social services and cruelly farmed out to separate foster parents.
Amer’s own upbringing wasn’t quite as challenging. She grew up in the US, after her parents emigrated from Egypt. Her father is a doctor and her mother did development work. But she still faced challenges reconciling her Muslim and American identities. “There was pressure on me from my parents, bless them, to be this perfect Arab girl who was at the pinnacle of modernity and still abiding by all the rules of being a good Muslim girl.
So she walked away and chose to make the film independently, which partly explains why it all took so long. In the end, though, the actual shoot lasted just two and a half weeks, especially impressive considering the natural performances she gets from her child actors. “Everything was hard,” she says, “so directing kids just felt like another aspect of what it took to make this film.”
Har’el, whose films have also blended fiction and documentary, agrees: “It’s really hard to capture nuance when you practice film-making that is very generic and has to fall into festival categories and distribution categories, and all sorts of ideas society has imposed on films. Sometimes it takes an artist like Dina to step out of those binary ideas of film-making and identity.”
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