Dina Amer on the Troubling, Unforgettable True Story Behind ‘You Resemble Me’

When we first meet Hasna—the protagonist of Dina Amer’s first feature film, You Resemble Me, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday—all we really know about her is that she’s a good big sister. The movie opens with Hasna, who’s about ten years old, doing the best she can with what little she has to make her younger sibling Mariam’s birthday special.

Hasna can’t afford to buy Mariam gifts, but she has the street smarts to steal them for her. As she leads Mariam on a gallivanting tour through their rough, low-income Paris neighborhood, we get a sense that this is how they spend most of their time—treating streets two young girls probably shouldn’t travel alone like a playground. By the end of their day together, you find yourself moved by Hasna’s boundless love for her sister, and her ability to wring joy from a place where, it seems, happiness might be hard to come by. 

When they finally get home, disaster strikes: After a violent fight with their mother sends them fleeing into the streets of Paris, they get picked up by the French authorities, separated, and placed into two different foster homes. 

At that point, you think you know what you’re getting into: A coming-of-age film about two sisters overcoming adversity, who make up for all that they don’t have with the profound relationship that they do. You have no inkling that by the time the credits roll and about 15 years have passed, Hasna will become radicalized by the Islamic State, and be labeled Europe’s first female suicide bomber by outlets around the globe. 

You Resemble Me—which was produced in partnership with VICE Studios, and co-executive produced by Spike Jonze, Spike Lee, and Alma Har’el, among others—is a fiction film. But it’s based on real people and true events, a factual backstory no one has more thoroughly researched than its director. Amer, a former journalist who has worked for The New York Times, CNN, and VICE, was on the ground in Paris in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 terror attacks at the Bataclan, the Stade de France, and other areas around the city. A few days after the attacks, dozens of journalists—including Amer—reported that a woman named Hasna Ait Boulahcen had detonated a suicide vest during a shootout with French police. The police later revealed they had made a mistake in their investigation: Though Ait Boulahcen did die in the blast, it was Abdelhamid Abaaoud, one of the orchestrators of the attacks and Ait Boulahcen’s cousin, who set off the explosion.

In the wake of Ait Boulahcen’s death, Amer tracked down her family and began to learn, firsthand, who the woman erroneously accused of being Europe’s first female suicide bomber really was. She spent the next several years speaking with her family members and friends, and drew on more than 360 hours of interviews to make You Resemble Me as accurate a portrait of Ait Boulahcen’s life as possible. 

VICE spoke with Amer about what drew her to Ait Boulahcen’s story, her yearslong quest to tell it, and the power of viewing someone accused of a terrible crime not with judgement, but with empathy.

How did you first come across Hasna’s story?
[When the 2015 Paris attacks happened,] I went straight to the scenes of the attacks. The news at the time was that the mastermind of the attacks—Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Hasna’s cousin—was in Syria. Five days later, we wake up to the news that, holy shit, this guy is in Saint-Denis, hiding out. All the media rushed over. And I reported for VICE that Hasna was [Europe’s] first female suicide bomber—because that was what the police had confirmed. Days later, it proved to be incorrect information. But the damage was done.

I got a tip as to where Hasna’s family lived, and I went there. Young guys from the neighborhood instantly created, like, a human chain and blocked me from entering the building. The next day I came back and no one was there. I just went up the stairs. I didn’t know which apartment it was. I know this sounds very strange, but I knocked on my lucky number. And this man opened the door and he was like, “What are you doing here, who are you looking for?” And I was like, “I’m looking for Hasna’s mom.” He was like, “That’s my girlfriend.” So he brought her to the door, and they kept me there outside the door for, like, 20 minutes. Eventually, she let me in. 

She showed me a picture of her daughter as a child. And she said, “This woman with the niqab that they’re showing all over the news on every channel—that’s not my daughter. This is my daughter.” Everything changed when it was framed in that way: Like, how did that happen? How did that girl become the woman in the news, in the niqab, who was called the first female suicide bomber? 

How did you manage to get Hasna’s mother to feel comfortable speaking with you?
All these journalists had come clamoring to her, and she wasn’t interested. But I think she saw some of her daughter in me. She told me that I reminded her of her daughter: “You guys were around the same age, you guys look like you could have been sisters.” And it made a difference that I’m a Muslim woman: I’m not coming to vilify, slam, demonize, or sensationalize; I’m coming to understand how this happened to her daughter. 

About a week [after we first met], she called me and she was like, “We’re gonna go to the morgue to see Hasna’s body.” And I went with her. That’s where I met Mariam, Hasna’s sister. And some of Hasna’s friends were there. These are girls with, like, ripped jeans and weave and fake nails—they were not the image of what you would imagine to be the best friends of Europe’s accused first female suicide bomber.

That sounds like it would be a harrowing experience. What was being at the morgue like, for you?
The coroner, this white French woman, was describing to us what we were about to see, and saying how [Hasna’s] nose was decomposed. Everyone was just silent. And Mariam interjected and she’s like, “You’re describing this corpse—that’s not my sister. If you want to know who my sister is, I’ll show you.” And she took out her phone and started swiping through images of her sister with a cowboy hat on, partying on the beach—different snapshots of Hasna. She was like, “This is my sister. She was broken. She was confused. She didn’t know who she was. But she couldn’t kill someone.”

Then we saw the body. Mariam was up against the glass, and she was crying hysterically. The mom didn’t get close to the body. She was doing loud incantations of prayer. And the coroner was in the back of the room being like, Are we even in France now? 

As Mariam was walking down the stairs—and she was completely a wreck, she had to be helped down the stairs—she was saying, “At least her head was attached to her body. I was so scared it wouldn’t be. I didn’t know what I was gonna see.” And the mom took Mariam’s hand and she said, “Mariam, you shouldn’t wear nail polish. Nail polish is of the devil.” And Mariam stopped crying and she said, “There was nothing wrong with Hasna. The only thing that was wrong with her was that she was born into this family. I want to stay as far away from all of you as possible.” 

That’s when I understood, like, OK: This is not just a terror headline. This is about a dysfunctional family, and that is a universal lens. I was never interested in making a film about terrorism. I was interested in making a film about: Who is this woman? What is her life? What is her journey? 

From that point on, how did you go about researching Hasna’s life, and how intensive was that process?
I couldn’t completely get rid of the journalist in me. I couldn’t just read about the news online and then write a script. I had to go and spend time with her family. Over three years—over the course of making this film—I would constantly touch back with them. And I didn’t just connect to the family. I found just about everyone in her inner circle. So the script is informed by over 360 hours of interviews. When you spend that much time on a single human being’s life, you feel like you really know them. You feel like they’re present. It’s a visceral feeling. 

Why did you decide to make this a feature film as opposed to a documentary?
For me, intimacy with Hasna was hugely important, and Hasna is no longer with us. Her childhood is something of the past. I didn’t want to frame it through a documentary, factual lens, where it was just people giving testimonies. I wanted people to be in her skin, in her shoes, in her head. I wanted to approach it in a way where people could experience her arc and see her as a child and care about and have intimacy with her.

When Mariam would tell me stories about their childhood, she always used to tell me, “If you’re making this film, please, the most important thing to me is that people know that we didn’t want to be separated.” And I was like, I don’t want to tell that through a documentary. I want people to care about those girls. These stories you’re telling me about your adventures, and how you used to steal from the market and get caught, and all of these things—I want to be able to experience that. 

Even though it’s a fictional film, it feels very real. At certain moments, you almost do feel like you’re watching a documentary. How did you accomplish that?
It was very important for me that this was authentic. That it was informed by interviews, and that it was made by people who are from [Hasna’s] community—who understand, firsthand, what it feels like to be the other in France. I did a lot of street casting from the very neighborhoods that Hasna grew up in or lived in as an adult. It was made predominantly by Black and Arab Muslims from the hood. That was hugely important to me, to maintain the authenticity of the story, even in the filmmaking and the team that I chose. 

How closely would you say your film hews to the actual details of Hasna’s life?
I would say it’s pretty close. Everything that I wrote in that script was pretty much sourced from my interviews. The actual circumstances are what happened in reality. And that was important to me. I wanted to be respectful to the true story and to all the testimonies that I was given.

But it is a few degrees removed from the truth, because these are actors and there is dialogue. Once you bring actors into the equation, you find truth in a different way. It’s in a certain look on their face; it’s how they embody the truth. So as much as possible, I fed my actors the visceral imprint I had of Hasna. I felt very close to her. I felt like I really knew her. I spent so much time with that family to the extent that they started calling me Hasna. I felt so deeply connected to Hasna, and to the family, and to her inner world, that I could infuse that into the filmmaking, into the actors and into the writers. I realized that the closer [the film] was to that truth, the more powerful it would be.

Are you nervous at all about how Hasna’s family might react to the film when they see it?
No, I’m not nervous. I think it’ll be very emotional for them, because it’s difficult to relive all that and to see it on a screen. But I pray that they also feel a certain catharsis and vindication—that Hasna exists beyond just the headline of a suicide bomber, that there’s a complexity to her as a human being now that never was afforded to her.

Prejudice against Muslims and Arab folks in France is still a pervasive problem. Given that this film is in French—and, ostensibly, it will be seen in France—how do you think it might be received there?
I pray that it’s received with open arms. This film was never meant to justify Hasna’s choice. But it was meant to give us a glimpse into all the ingredients that went into that pot and made the stew go rotten. And it’s not just one thing; it’s many things at play.

My intention is that [this film] can help make France safer. The terror cycle is not going away. I pray that after watching this film, the reaction to radicalization is not just through militarization and policing, but rather going into these communities, investing in the youth, investing in mental health support, making sure that there’s other, more human safeguards that can stop people from going down into the same trap. So this is my offering to France, to help heal the country of this wound, and to raise certain questions: How can we prevent this from happening again and again and again?

This whole film was born out of the opportunity to deconstruct terrorism and allow people to see themselves in someone that we dismiss as a monster. That was what kept pushing me: The idea that an audience could see a reflection of themselves in her complicated humanity. And that by creating that link, we could be better equipped to tackle this issue.

What were some of the biggest hurdles that you had to overcome to make this movie?
There was so much resistance to me making this a fiction film. I walked away from a deal—a multimillion dollar deal—where I could have made the film with some fiction, but it would be more hybrid. It would be [mostly documentary, with some] recreations. And I didn’t want to do that, because I believed in the power of the story, dramatically, to be told. And the reason why there were these restrictions on how much fiction could be told, or if it could be fiction at all, or if I could even allow Hasna to exist in the film as a child, was because of how sensitive, politically, the story was.

That was what kind of invigorated me to make this film—to push up against that. We make films all the time about people who are considered monsters, whether it’s Ted Bundy, whether it’s Jojo Rabbit—individuals, real individuals, who have committed attacks on society. So why can’t I do this about a brown Arab woman? Oh: It’s because she’s a brown Arab woman. 

This film was a true test of tenacity and compulsion to continue against all the odds. Had I just taken no for an answer the multitude of times it was said to me, I would not have finished this film. It was an incredibly difficult film to pull off—from a financing point of view, from a casting point of view. To convince people to humanize and step into the shoes of Hasna—that was very difficult. No one wanted to play the cousin, the most hated man in France. So it was constantly a struggle. I just kept pushing. And I was very fortunate to work with such a talented group of people who understood my intention.

You’ve brought up the idea of having people see themselves in Hasna repeatedly. To what degree do you, personally, see yourself in Hasna?
This whole film was born out of me seeing myself in Hasna. It was such a difficult film to make, and what allowed me to continue was understanding her, and understanding her very specific struggle of reconciling her identity in the West as a Muslim, Arab woman. I could relate to that. I was born in the U.S., but my parents emigrated to this country [from Egypt]. I’m contending with being Western and modern, but also having roots in the Middle East. 

You end up kind of feeling like you don’t belong anywhere. I go to Egypt—I don’t really, fully belong there. I’m seen as the girl coming from America. I’m here—I realize that I’m Muslim, and I’m different. So I could understand the struggles to reconcile that identity. And I think that my connection to her sustained me through the filmmaking process.

Follow Drew Schwartz on Twitter.