Something I’ve been avoiding

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.

There are parts of this story I’ve hesitated to write. Not because they aren’t important, but because they sit too close to the bone. I’ve kept the focus on history, on the systems (colonial order, regulated sex, surveillance…) and I think that has been necessary, at least as a starting point. It has given me a framework to develop within, as well as some distance.

But stories have a way of turning. And this one keeps circling back to Oum. I haven’t really written about what drew me to her, not in a way that captures what she is to me. The emotional rhythm of her feels familiar, though I still hesitate to name why.

She unsettles me. That much I’ve said. I’ve called her contradictory, difficult, fractured. But I think that language softens something. The truth is harder. I feel drawn to her. Protective, almost. And I’m also afraid of her. There is something in her I recognise, though I’d rather not admit how or why. I won’t say more than that here… but those who need to might read between the lines.

Oum is a woman shaped by the conditions of her time and by things that happened long before the film begins. She’s experienced abandonment, humiliation, powerlessness. She has also learned how to wield control. At times with care. At other times with force. She protects the space she controls. And she harms the people within it.

She is not “complex” in the neat sense that word often implies. She’s messy. Contradictory. At times deeply caring. At other times violent in her silences, in her precision, in the ways she chooses to assert herself. She is not consistent, and that too feels familiar.

There are people whose presence makes you feel both loved and afraid. People who hold you tightly and leave you flinching. People who protect you, fight for you, speak of devotion, and still manage to leave a kind of mark that takes years to understand. Years longer to speak of. If it can be spoken of at all.

What do you do with that kind of love? The kind that nurtures and erodes you at once. That teaches you to be loyal to someone who has hurt you. That leaves you both caring for and frightened of the same person.

I know that territory. I’ve moved through it slowly, as one learns to cross a room in the dark… carefully, and without sound. And while this film isn’t autobiographical, there are things in it that press against that terrain. I write around them rather than through them. But they’re there. Sitting just under the surface.

Oum, for me, is the embodiment of a kind of emotional logic I’ve never found language for. The logic of someone who has been so destabilised, so shamed, so unprotected, that the only way to feel secure again is to become the one who decides. Who determines. Who survives by creating structure, even if it becomes its own form of cruelty.

And those around her adapt. They learn how to read the room, how to stay small, how to anticipate. They become careful. Not because they are weak, but because they have to be. Because someone else’s mood becomes the weather.

There’s a tendency, especially in cinema, to redeem characters like her. To offer some final moment of grace or revelation. I don’t want that. I don’t think it’s honest. What I want is to hold her in view without trying to fix her. To let her be all the things she is. Powerful and frightening. Tender and brutal. Loyal and dangerous.

I used to think that understanding someone’s past could undo the harm they caused. That if you knew their history, if you knew the pain behind the rage, it would somehow be enough. It isn’t. But it does make the harm harder to hold. It blurs the edges. You start making space for their pain before your own. You start feeling responsible for their survival. You start protecting them.

That’s the contradiction I keep writing toward. And maybe why I keep writing around it.

I’ve read the quote attributed to Rumi many times: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” It’s beautiful. I also think it’s incomplete. Some wounds don’t invite light. They don’t open. They calcify. They live quietly in the nervous system, in your posture, in your sense of what’s possible. They become part of how you move through the world, how you enter a room, how you listen for silence, how you prepare for affection to be followed by something else.

I don’t want to dramatise that. I don’t want to build the film around it. But it’s in there. Threaded through. Shaping the tone. The pacing. The way the camera lingers and retreats.

This isn’t a story that moves toward resolution. It resists clarity. It asks us to stay in the discomfort of not knowing exactly who someone is. To sit with the people we love who have frightened us. The people who have tried, and failed, and tried again. The ones who are capable of great tenderness. And of harm.

Oum won’t explain herself. She doesn’t need to. The film isn’t her confession. It’s just the space in which we watch her. And where, perhaps, someone will see something they’ve never said out loud.

I’m writing into that silence. Not to expose it. Just to acknowledge that it exists. That it shaped something in me. That it still does.