Nora el Hourch has come to Barcelona several times – the first time when she was 14 – and now returns to the Catalan capital to present, within the framework of the D’A Film Festival, her debut feature HLM Pussy, a generational portrait about consent, racism and social networks that hits theaters this Friday after passing through the Toronto Film Festival. “I love Spain because it is a feminist country,” says this 36-year-old Franco-Moroccan director with a broad smile in a talk with La Vanguardia, who already surprised at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival by participating in the Filmmakers’ Fortnight with her short film Quelques. seconds.
“I have always had a vital need to write and I have been telling stories since I was six years old. When I was 20 I went to live in the United States and there I suffered a sexual assault. I returned to France and somehow I stopped writing for five years. But Then I felt the need to explain my story to save myself and to communicate with other people who had gone through an experience like mine.
That’s why she decided to make a short film in three days with just 3,000 euros that addressed the theme of rape and which was very well received both at the French competition and at other festivals. “I thought that after the success of the short it would be easy to make my first feature film, but it has lasted almost 10 years. What has helped me continue is the desire to tell this story and continue with this fight,” he admits.
Amina, Djeneba and Zineb are friends and have been very close since they were children. The first comes from a good family. Her mother – played by Bérenice Bejo – is a lawyer and her father, of Moroccan origin, and with whom she is always arguing, is a renowned surgeon who came to France as a young man with a scholarship. Djeneba is black and lives with her uncle and Zineb is of Arab origin. During Zineb’s mother’s birthday party, the young woman’s brother’s best friend sexually assaults her. From then on, the combative Amina decides to publish a compromising video, which goes viral, in the hope that the boy will stop harassing her friend. A risky option that will distance her from her colleagues, who do not approve of what she has done, and will receive threats from the harasser.
For Amina it is essential to have evidence “so that justice is done”, although her mother warns her that she cannot take justice into her own hands. “The problem is that justice is very slow and many times the people who have been accused receive less severe punishments,” says El Hourch. And he continues: “Social networks are the weapon that new generations use to report these cases, although it is true that it is a double-edged sword but it is necessary to express themselves and change things because if we left it in the hands of justice they would not change. So much so. Amina personifies this. She is aware that evidence is needed and she wants to create it to post it on her social network and report it. Amina’s problem is that she imposes her point of view on that of her friends, who belong to social and economic environments. and cultural and have very different priorities,” says the director and screenwriter, who points to two Me Too: “that of the privileged classes and that of the disadvantaged classes, which go at a different speed.”
In one scene in the film, a teacher asks Amina’s class if they think history is written on social media. They all answer affirmatively. “It is a generation that was born with social networks and they learn everything through them. I don’t want to say that this has to replace school, but for them it is a weapon, a fight and a source of knowledge that moderates their way of thinking “I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, but that’s the way it is.”
The film’s great asset is based on the complicity and naturalness in the relationship between the three teenage protagonists, played by young people with no experience in front of the cameras. “To find them, we launched a casting call on social media and received 900 videos and I found three of them. We rehearsed for a month. I wanted it to be something real and a true friendship was created between them,” says Nora, who encouraged them to work hard. to achieve the authenticity of the story “and also have fun.”
HLM Pussy, which refers to the name of the friends’ gang-sisterhood, belongs to a list of films about consent that are landing on the billboard (How to have sex, Hotel Royal, Not a Pretty Picture…), and that the filmmaker sees as something very positive, despite the fact that there were so many of them was one of the obstacles she encountered when financing it – the film cost half a million euros: “When Me Too appeared, it opened a door so that women could speak, although it is still frowned upon for women to speak and it was necessary for different points of view to appear on this issue. We must continue talking about consent.”
During yesterday’s presentation of the film, Nora confessed that she currently works as a waitress to earn a living and that the film was made in a very precarious way. “I earned the minimum wage for two months and while I was preparing the film in the afternoon, in the morning I worked in the cafe. At the casting I had the girls come during my break time and if I went over time, the boss would looked at me and quickly put on my apron. My economic status has not moved a bit with this film and I have invested all my money in it,” says this filmmaker, gesturing with a laugh, whose hope is that with the second film “I can make some progress.” a little bit and make some money. Her idea is to “modestly continue making films that can change the world and address taboo subjects because it is the reason why I started making films.”
