In 2023, it’s up to young queer filmmakers to turn their cameras away from the trauma narratives that have so far mostly defined LGBTQ filmmaking and instead toward its potential for joyful expression and celebration. For cynics with a wary brow toward being uplifted, your mileage may vary for 1990-born drag performer turned filmmaker Amrou Al-Kadhi’s “Layla,” an exuberant appreciation of queer life even as it skims the surface of weightier issues around identity. But even the most callous of hearts — though anyone not already cosigned to the movie’s sensibilities is unlikely to see this film — will find it hard to skirt the charms of this sensitive, well-acted, and confidently shot feature about a non-binary Arab drag queen who gets lost in love but finds themselves at the other side of its failure. That’s even as many moments of the story feel manufactured just to keep it going.
- 1/18/2024
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Drag queens are a huge part of contemporary pop culture. They are on TV, on social media and forever on the minds of conservative politicians who try to ostracize them and muffle their voices. Yet despite this ubiquity, they rarely appear as movie leads. Writer-director Amrou Al-Kadhi rectifies that with their debut feature “Layla,” unspooling in the World Dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Like most Sundance discoveries, it introduces a new voice trying to carve a space for themselves in the medium. And like most feature debuts, it shows how that voice needs to be honed and nurtured, so that their next feature might more successfully accomplish its goals.
Layla (Bilal Hasna) is a London drag queen living a double life. With their friends, they live their truth as a nonbinary person and drag performer. Yet when they visit their Palestinian family, they become Latif, the dutiful son.
Layla (Bilal Hasna) is a London drag queen living a double life. With their friends, they live their truth as a nonbinary person and drag performer. Yet when they visit their Palestinian family, they become Latif, the dutiful son.
- 1/18/2024
- by Murtada Elfadl
- Variety Film + TV
Hello and welcome back to the Scene 2 Seen Podcast, I am your host Valerie Complex. On today’s episode we’re chatting with director-producer Dina Amer.
Amer is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She helped produce the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary The Square, in which the Egyptian Revolution was chronicled from the front lines. Growing up between the U.S. and Egypt, her work has focused on sharing nuanced, human stories with a global audience.
From documentary, she’s moved over to features and has debuted her first film, You Resemble Me, which tells the true story of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a woman falsely accused of being Europe’s first female suicide bomber.
At the time, police had confirmed the 26-year-old Boulahcen was the woman who died when she blew herself up during a police raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis in the aftermath of the 2015 terror attacks in the city.
Amer is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She helped produce the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary The Square, in which the Egyptian Revolution was chronicled from the front lines. Growing up between the U.S. and Egypt, her work has focused on sharing nuanced, human stories with a global audience.
From documentary, she’s moved over to features and has debuted her first film, You Resemble Me, which tells the true story of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a woman falsely accused of being Europe’s first female suicide bomber.
At the time, police had confirmed the 26-year-old Boulahcen was the woman who died when she blew herself up during a police raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis in the aftermath of the 2015 terror attacks in the city.
- 2/9/2023
- by Valerie Complex
- Deadline Film + TV
‘You Resemble Me’ Review: Fractured Life of a Radicalized Frenchwoman Becomes a Kaleidoscopic Biopic
Sisters Hasna and Mariam look alike and inseparable, a few years apart but bonded like twins, sporting identical floral dresses (minus the snipped-off security tags) as they bounce around the fringes of their Parisian housing estate while their neglectful mother sleeps. What these twirling balls of energy say to each other at their most connected — like a mantra of togetherness in a world of hardship — is the title of Dina Amer’s narrative feature debut: “You Resemble Me.”
But that title could also be what Amer hopes the older sister, Hasna, might say today, if she could, about the bursting, restless slice of tragedy that tells her story — a troubled girl from a broken home and an isolating foster system who becomes a lost, searching woman introduced to the wider world through her worst decision: getting involved with the terrorists who lay siege on Paris in November of 2015, dying in...
But that title could also be what Amer hopes the older sister, Hasna, might say today, if she could, about the bursting, restless slice of tragedy that tells her story — a troubled girl from a broken home and an isolating foster system who becomes a lost, searching woman introduced to the wider world through her worst decision: getting involved with the terrorists who lay siege on Paris in November of 2015, dying in...
- 11/3/2022
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
Four days after the November 2015 Paris attacks, French police raided an apartment building in the suburban neighborhood of Saint-Denis in search of the mastermind responsible for the bloodshed. He was killed, along with several others — most notably a young woman named Hasna Aït Boulahcen, reported to be Europe’s first suicide bomber. Vice journalist Dina Amer, an Egyptian-American Muslim, was one of the people who reported that news from the scene; when viral cell phone video of the events later revealed that Aït Boulahcen had been a casualty of the explosion and not its cause, Amer became obsessed with learning the truth behind why Aït Boulahcen was in Saint-Denis that night (and also with atoning for the media’s rush to judgment and racist penchant for othering).
Within days of Aït Boulahcen’s death, Amer began recording more than 360 hours of interview footage with the late woman’s family and friends,...
Within days of Aït Boulahcen’s death, Amer began recording more than 360 hours of interview footage with the late woman’s family and friends,...
- 11/2/2022
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
"A powerful cry from the heart." Dedza Films has released the official US trailer for a French / Egyptian indie project titled You Resemble Me, an emotional true story drama about two sisters - marking the feature debut of filmmaker Dina Amer. This first premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival last year in the Critics' Week sidebar, and has played at many other fests, including at the 2022 Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier this year. When two young sisters are torn apart, the older one loses her identity and transforms into someone new in the name of belonging and resistance. It's been 7 years since Bataclan and the shocking incident with Hasna Aït Boulahcen. Inspired by true events, You Resemble Me tells her story. In narrative form, the film recounts Hasna's upbringing, the unfortunate events that led to her choices, and the way she was depicted in the media. "An insistence on...
- 10/21/2022
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
The first trailer for “You Resemble Me,” the feature directorial debut of “The Square” associate producer Dina Amer, has been unveiled. The film debuted at Venice in 2021 and has had a stellar festival run since, picking up plaudits on the way.
The film, executive produced by Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, Riz Ahmed and Alma Har’el, tells the true story of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a woman who was falsely accused of being Europe’s first female suicide bomber. It follows two sisters on the outskirts of Paris and after the siblings are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading to a choice that shocks the world.
The starting point for the film was the Bataclan attacks in Paris, where Amer was a journalist reporting on the scene.
“As a Muslim Egyptian woman living in the West, I’ve struggled to reconcile pieces of my identity that feel contradictory.
The film, executive produced by Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, Riz Ahmed and Alma Har’el, tells the true story of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, a woman who was falsely accused of being Europe’s first female suicide bomber. It follows two sisters on the outskirts of Paris and after the siblings are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading to a choice that shocks the world.
The starting point for the film was the Bataclan attacks in Paris, where Amer was a journalist reporting on the scene.
“As a Muslim Egyptian woman living in the West, I’ve struggled to reconcile pieces of my identity that feel contradictory.
- 10/21/2022
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
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