Dina Amer’s Debut You Resemble Me Is a Wrenching, Immersive Drama of Identity
“Am I Muslim? Am I French? Am I crazy?”
In her directorial debut, award-winning journalist-turned-filmmaker Dina Amer is trying something different. A rigorously and investigatively sourced biopic embedded with a face-to-face documentary short, You Resemble Me recounts a history so contemporary it could blend into today’s headlines, so recent you could’ve been there for it—like Amer was.
The film opens on Hasna Aït Boulahcen, a young French-Arab girl in Saint-Denis on the outskirts of Paris, questioning her place in the world before concluding she should throw herself off a balcony. “Maybe then they would pay attention to me.” It ends much worse, the same little girl growing up to be wholly, societally disregarded before getting seduced into jihadist radicalization and becoming collateral in a suicide bomber explosion she would be wrongly blamed for by mass media, “buried like a dog in an unmarked grave.”
On the ground reporting for Vice—five days after the string of November 2015 terrorist attacks that killed 130 people—Amer was in Saint-Denis the day the bomb went off mid-police-siege, Hasna inside. That means Amer was also among the original swath of reporters to falsely report Hasna as the first female suicide bomber, a story that momentarily took the world by storm. As it turned out, Hasna was there with her cousin, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a key player in the attacks, who persuaded her to join the extremist group, as the film shows, in the wake of deep desperation and brokenness not long before she died.
Amer, like other self-respecting journalists, corrected her report two days later after the police’s amendment that it was another man in the room who detonated the vest. But in 48 hours, the media had slandered Hasna post-mortem so salaciously that there was no coming back. The vile, exploitative coverage was enough to ruin her family’s life in the aftermath, bomber, bystander or victim.
Painted as the “cowgirl of the hood”—a wayward, contemptible drug-abuser-meets-sex worker-meets-terrorist—Hasna’s reputation fell prey to an onslaught of reports eager to dogpile on the easy (now-dead) target from one of many angles: Xenophobia, Islamophobia, misogyny, religious blasphemy, cultural dishonor, the list goes on. Choose your motivation and there’s an army behind it. Tacking onto the shameful coverage, the media never properly identified her. Through photos, they popularized three versions of Hasna, only one of which was actually her. As Amer started to dig into Hasna’s story, her coverage trended in the opposite direction.
Soon, she was the only journalist Hasna’s mother would grant an interview. Six years, 360 hours of case interviews and an immeasurable amount of research later, Amer set the story straight in celluloid, debuting You Resemble Me at Venice 2021. Like in all great character studies steeped in history, Hasna was unearthed through research, but in this case, unlike most, it was proprietary research, stories that hadn’t been collected, much less told. Amer studied Hasna, her world and her family on such a granular level that she felt compelled to fill in the gaps, to answer the question: How and why does something like this happen?
You Resemble Me is a look at how one comes to be ostracized and radicalized, a bold attempt to humanize a terrorist—one caught in the crossfire of belief—by taking a step back to probe her motivations. How did she understand her actions through the lens of her battered existence? What did she think she was doing? What would we do in that situation? The questions transcend race and religion. As Amer points out, radicalization is “not just a Muslim problem. It’s a far right wing problem” that stretches across borders.
That said, Amer—an Egyptian-American woman born and raised in the U.S., recognized for her coverage of events ranging from the Arab Spring to the Syrian civil war—has a vested interest in exploring the particulars of Hasna’s identity. The perpetual inner turmoil of wrestling with aspects of your identity is universal—what isn’t is the immense cultural and geopolitical weight of Hasna’s position as a modern Muslim woman in the West; as Amer relates it to herself, one who has “to contend with the same mission of reconciling that identity of being Arab and Western and Muslim and liberal” in a world slow to integrate.
Amer effectively stylizes You Resemble Me to immerse viewers in the constant state of identity crisis that is Hasna’s day-to-day. Omar Mullick’s handheld camera is near-sentient, as aware of Hasna’s surroundings as she must be, always noticing Muslim women in a world that doesn’t welcome them. The moments aren’t colored with commentary but left to linger, like they do in real time. The camera shakes as violently and casually as one in a Lars von Trier film, channeling Hasna’s perennial anxiety. The soundscape is atmospheric, a gripping score with surprise needle drops, dissonant winds, deep drums and sharp sounds that keep you on edge.
One of Amer’s most interesting choices—pertaining to Hasna’s three media personas—is her decision to cast adult Hasna as three separate women (Mouna Soualem, Sabrina Ouazani and Amer herself), muddying her identity through a thematic reflection on the media’s mistakes and Hasna’s lifelong tendency to morph into someone else: “You don’t know all the women I’ve been.” It doesn’t happen often, and sometimes it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it affair, but it’s an impressive flourish, and one that keeps the capital question in focus: Who was Hasna Aït Boulahcen?