Last month Dina Amer was featured in the Esquire 40, a list of Arabs making an impact on global film and television. It’s no wonder: her debut feature, You Resemble Me, premiered at the 78th Venice where it was nominated for Giornate degli Autori. The striking film follows the radicalization of a young woman in a hostile French environment. It has taken home awards at Red Sea International Film Festival and International Federation of Film Critics. Esquire spoke to Amer from her hotel room in Salt Lake City where she was taking part in the Sundance Film Festival.
Congratulations on the film. It’s an incredible achievement. It’s your debut feature, but it feels very assured. How did you find the confidence to take on such a narratively and technically challenging story?
Honestly it wasn’t a choice. It was driven by a necessity. The story found me and I was utterly possessed and obsessed I had no choice but to work to serve the story as best as I could. I think when you’re driven by belief it can defy logic and rationale and you just have to find the courage to keep going till you reach the finish line .
How do you get Spike Lee, Spike Jonze and Riz Ahmed to sign on as executive producers?
Spike Lee was my professor at NYU he read my earliest drafts and was the only person in my ear who encouraged me to walk away from a major multi-million dollar studio deal when the price of compromising my vision felt too high. The vibrancy and artistic sovereignty that reflects through Do the Right Thing was a big reference for me. Spike Jonze I met through Vice, he was the creative director of the company at the time. He also was a major influence on me artistically the freedom and wild creativity that birthed Being John Malkovich in speaking to identity and self remain with me today. Riz is a dear friend and a true example of someone who is paving his own path as a Muslim artist. I was so honoured and grateful to have them all on-board as guiding lights.
Are high profile names like that important to getting something off the ground?
No not really, what’s important to getting thing off the ground is relentless obsessive perseverance. It’s a hard long and winding road and it takes stamina and a whole lot of faith in my opinion to finish a film.
You were a journalist for a long time with the New York Times, CNN and probably most famously with VICE. How did that experience inform this film and your practice as a writer and director more broadly?
I think at the core it’s all storytelling but it’s using different tools and freedom in expressing those stories. I think I’m naturally a very curious and adventurous person and that served me as a journalist and also as a filmmaker. I love people and their stories, I love connecting and finding the deepest truths within people and myself— I think filmmaking saved me though. It allowed me to find a greater level of freedom as a human being.
I think of other great journalists – like David Simon – who have gone on to tell gritty and raw stories. How do you stop things from getting too journalistic, keeping them cinematic?
I don’t know these choices are not very conscious for me. I’m a deep lover of cinema and I personally relish in bringing something to the screen that feels bigger than this physical reality. Something that feels transcendent and emotionally, spiritually true. I really believe people are chosen to tell certain stories and that every choice comes from a deeply intuitive place. There is a big responsibility to reflect on your intention and choices but from there you there is a bigger responsibility to trust you’re impulses and sensibilities in order to serve the story.
You use deep fake technology in the film to showcase how the world sees Hasna and how she sees herself in her various stages. It’s often jarring when the transition happens. How did you decide to use that kind of tech in a film that’s otherwise very raw and real?
I think this feeling of disassociation, code switching and shape shifting to find human connection was very sacred to me because it illuminated the essence of why she radicalized and also shined a light of why I personally could see myself in her and feel I could make this film. I wanted the audience the experience her multiplicity and schizophrenia of self and how it led to this dangerous fragility.
So you’re not the kind of creative who is worried about AI and that kind of thing…
No bring it all on so long as I feel it’s serves an emotional truth.
Do you still work as a journalist or is it cinema all the way now?
Yeah I’m definitely a recovering journalist. I’m grateful for how journalism gave me curiosity in human stories and the human condition. It gave me this truth that you don’t know until you go. My connection to story is still very much by embedding myself and swimming in the waters of the truth and I’m grateful for the refuge of filmmaking that has allowed me to tell these stories on my own terms artistically.
What are you working on next?
Many things… stay tuned!