Daylight trespass

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 keep turning the same uneasy sentence in my mouth like a loose tooth…

Their story is not mine to tell, yet it keeps speaking through me.

I grew up with a Moroccan mother in London, fluent in the language of empire, clumsy in the language of my maternal lineage. I arrive at the threshold of this story half invited, half intruding, holding a key that barely fits the lock. The film I’m making about Oum El Hassen is neither rescue nor testimony nor confession. It feels like daylight trespass, and the door groans every time I push it.

Authenticity.

Producers demand it, funders underline it, audiences swear they know when it is missing. Still, every frame in a film is a construction; every silence is narrative, whether it was written on the page, shaped in performance, or chosen in the edit. The colonial archive performs too… ledgers, studio portraits, brittle negatives prepared for distant eyes. Authenticity then, slides into costume, it is seductive and unreliable. Genet understood this; his thieves and maids crackle with an energy that is lab-grown, a fiction that is able to outshine even the official record.

Last night I watched Hounds by Kamal Lazraq. I first met Kamal at his wrap party in producer Said Hamich’s Casablanca apartment while I was shooting Beneath a Mother’s Feet. He appeared drained (by all accounts the shoot had been intense) and told me he had street-cast every role in the film. On screen that choice breathes. The acting feels loose yet purposeful, sustained by an unseen net of rehearsal perhaps. The faces in Hounds are new to cinema, but the lives behind them belong to the streets onscreen. These characters commit brutal acts; yet the camera lingers on their bruises rather than their blades. Horror and tenderness hold each other in balance, and the low thrum of unease stays with me after the credits fade.

In the real world, an endless feed loops violent and sexual images… bodies battered, stripped, abandoned... We watch, then scroll before feelings have a chance to settle.

How to film colonial cruelty without repeating its choreography?

Chantal Akerman stretches time until ordinary gestures turn unbearable: a potato peeled for ten silent minutes, a door slam that reverberates like a rifle-shot. Dread blooms in the gap between action and cut.

Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir once seemed to offer an alternative answer. Animation allowed memory to breathe where live footage might suffocate it. Rewatching it now, however, I see the film belongs to what critics call shooting and crying, the perpetrator’s lament that centres his own wound while the dead remain silhouettes. Folman’s confession is formally daring yet, in my view, launders guilt through beauty. It’s a warning flare for any project that dares to frame suffering.

Then I remember Skinamarink, a horror film made for the cost of a family holiday, two children, a missing doorway, cartoons stuttering on an old television, grain devouring the screen. Terror works almost subliminally here, a childhood nightmare kept just out of focus. As I’ve long known, suggestion is often more successful at cutting deeper than spectacle, and this film proves it.

I want my camera to hover like an afterthought. Let my film’s resident cat drift through the frame so the eye follows fur, not flesh. Let pain be heard, not seen…. let the blow register in our nervous system, without feasting on it. Yet restraint, this act of not showing, is not an alibi; absence can titillate too, and an unheard scream can be as exploitable as a shown one. Responsibility lies on one side, voyeurism on the other, the ground between them always shifting.

As I develop The Ogress of Fez, I hope I’m able to harness some of Akerman’s patience, the discipline to hold a shot until discomfort speaks for itself. I want Genet’s fever, the imaginative heat that makes his fiction feel more alive than fact. And I’ll try to keep Folman’s misgivings in mind, a cautionary reminder of how easily empathy can slide back into self-pity. Holding those three forces in tension is what I hope will keep me honest.

Every research trip, every postcard, every police file is a doorway into the past, but each doorway was built by violence. I’m grateful these records remain; I’m also ashamed of the suffering that produced them. My mother’s Arabic lullabies still play in my head, though the meaning of their words escape me. The women of Bousbir spoke languages I can barely parse; they never asked for my camera, for my lights, for me. I try to tread softly and leave fingerprints anyway, perhaps outlining them in chalk so the next filmmaker, the next daughter, knows someone passed through and tried not to steal the furniture.

I’m not claiming to speak for these women; I’m tracing how their history affects me. Or rather, I’m mapping where its gravity pulls while I sit inside the orbit of these stories. If my film succeeds, the audience won’t need a neat answer by its end, they’ll instead feel a brief, charged connection, like pressing a hand against a closed door and sensing someone breathing on the other side.

The film project is some ways saying silence is not simply the absence of sound. It can be chosen or imposed, revealing where power rests, how safety is negotiated, and who is granted agency. It shows whose stories are permitted. Within silence lie traces of lives and histories pushed from view, waiting for us to interpret, to excavate patiently, to read around the blank space and breathe them back into being with care and justice.

It’s also a way of saying that simply looking at something is never a neutral act.