Scene 2 podcast seen: Director and producer Dina Amer discusses journalism, directing her feature debut You Resemble Me, and telling human stories

Hello and welcome back to the Scene 2 Lakes Podcast, I’m your host Valerie Complex. In today’s episode we talk to director/producer Dina Amer.

Dina Amer is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist. She helped produce the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary The square, where the Egyptian revolution was chronicled from scratch. Raised between the US and Egypt, her work focuses on sharing nuanced, human stories with a global audience.

She made the transition from documentary to feature film and debuted with her first film, you look like 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 confirmed that 26-year-old Hasna Ait Boulahcen was the woman who died Wednesday when she blew herself up during a police raid on an apartment in the Paris neighborhood of Saint-Denis. The operation was aimed at the alleged leader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.

The film’s script, written after recording more than 300 hours of interviews with Hasna’s real family and close circle, describes the impact of cultural and intergenerational trauma. The film follows two sisters on the outskirts of Paris. After the siblings are torn apart, the eldest, Hasna, struggles to find her identity, leading to a decision that shocks the world. Director Dina Amer tackles one of the darkest issues of our time and deconstructs it in an intimate story about family, love, sisterhood and belonging.

The film was nominated for the Giornate degli Autori Award at the Venice Film Festival, won the Audience Award at the Red Sea Festival and won the Best Middle East/Israel Film Award at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

In addition to being a producer and director, Dina was also an award-winning journalist. She was an on-air correspondent for VICE, including The Black Market Series, where she exposed human trafficking of Syrian refugees and explored the underground economy of the illegal Egypt-Gaza tunnels. Her written work has been featured in The New York Times, CNN and The Huffington Post.

In today’s episode, Dina talks about her relationship with Hasna’s family, her time as a journalist and what it was like to make a documentary about one of the most influential revolutions of our time.

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