Forming, unforming

Part of an ongoing development journal for The Ogress of Fez, a feature drama about Oum El Hassen and the intersecting forces of empire, gender, and violence. Learn more.

I’m now 76 pages into the draft. It feels like a milestone, and also like something slowly coming undone. The more I write, the more the structure expands. Scenes deepen. Motifs repeat. The emotional weight is clearer. But so is the looseness. What started off as lean and focused has grown into something more sprawling, more layered… and harder to manage.

Oum has always been at the centre of this story, even when the film doesn’t start with her as its central protagonist. I want to hold her at a distance for a while, to let her presence build before we step fully into her world. I open the story with Charifa, a young prostitute who resides in the brothel under Oum’s care. She draws us into the villa, into the daily rituals, the inspections, the gossip, the glances that last a beat too long. Her sense of unease is subtle, but it grows more pronounced with time… When she is finally killed by Oum, everything around her fractures, including the narrative itself.

Esma arrives soon after. She doesn’t know what she’s walking into. Her character offers us a way of seeing Oum from another angle. Where Charifa’s death introduces Oum at her most despicable, Esma allows us to linger with her longer, to observe her in private, to question what drives her. Esma is disarmingly innocent, someone who hasn’t yet learned the rules. Oum watches her closely. At first it seems like curiosity. Then it becomes more charged, more personal. There’s a connection between them that neither of them fully understands. As the story unfolds, the film begins to ask whether we can grow to understand Oum; not to excuse her actions, but to see the forces that shaped her, and to sit with the discomfort of that.

The script is based on real people and real events. Oum El Hassen did exist. She had a daughter with a French soldier. That child was given up. And one of the women who worked in her brothel was found dismembered and hidden in a wicker hamper filled with herbs. These details stayed with me when I first read about them. Some of these facts come from court records. Others are scattered across colonial archives, written in the language of bureaucracy and control. The women themselves aren’t quoted. Their voices are missing. And that absence runs through the whole project.

A lot of what’s in the script has had to be imagined out of necessity, rather than invention for its own sake. I’ve tried to ground every choice in something historically plausible. If a woman is vomiting in the hammam, it’s because she might be pregnant and hiding it. If the brothel’s resident cat returns to the same doorway, it’s because animals remember patterns. If Oum prepares a tea laced with herbs, it’s because those herbs were used to soothe, to abort, or to kill. These choices are based in research, even when they’re not pulled directly from it.

What I’m trying to do now is maintain the tension in our story without letting the film lose its shape. There are moments that work; moments which are strong, clear, emotional. And others that repeat themselves or drift off… The pacing needs tightening. The structure is starting to strain under the weight of three main characters, Charifa, Esma, and Oum, each with her own arc and world. I need to make sure that they’re all still part of the same story.

It feels, at times, like trying to shape a clay pot on a wheel that spins faster the more I try to steady it. With each pass of the hand, I smooth one section only to find another beginning to warp. Add too much too quickly and the whole thing threatens to collapse under its own weight. Strip it back and I lose what gave it character. The taller it grows, the more fragile it becomes. That’s where I’m at now; caught between the pull to keep building and the risk of the whole thing buckling. I’m trying to keep the centre strong, even as the edges stretch outwards, unpredictably.

The scenes I’m most drawn to are the ones that hold back. The film is trying to work within the gaps in the record. It sits somewhere between testimony and imagination. There’s enough fact to anchor it, but not enough to build the whole thing from. So the story becomes a process of listening closely, reading between the lines, trying to give space to what was never recorded.

There’s still a long way to go. But I feel I’m getting closer. The world of the film is starting to feel alive. The characters are sharper now. The grief is heavier. The writing is doing something I didn’t expect, it’s becoming a way of thinking. About history. About violence. About women who were never meant to be remembered.

I just need to keep going.