The Hidden Woman, by Bachir Bensaddek | Based on a true story

In The Hidden Womanhis second feature-length fiction film, Bachir Bensaddek, director of Montreal the whitepaints the portrait of an Algerian immigrant preparing to confront the demons of her past. The Press the encounter.

A few years ago, after a screening in Montreal, a woman of Algerian origin approached producer Serge Noël to ask him to make a film about her life. As a joke, he replied that he would also like to make a film about his life. The woman then suggested that they go for a coffee so they could tell her about her life. The producer was upset by the confidences he heard.

“Her jaw dropped when she knew everything she had experienced. It was so out of all possibility as a journey, as a life, that before doing anything, Serge suggested that she write down everything she had experienced,” says Bachir Bensaddek, whom he met while working on his next film, Kabul, Montrealbased on a screenplay by Marie Vien (Augustine’s Passionby Léa Pool; The time of a summerby Louise Archambault).

Wanting to bring the destiny of this exceptional woman to the screen, Serge Noël met in Cannes the Quebec-Colombian screenwriter Maria Camila Arias (Birds of passageby Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra). Then the producer contacted Bachir Bensaddek, who agreed to embark on the project after reading the biographical notes.

In The Hidden Womanthis woman of Algerian origin, whose identity cannot be revealed, is played by the French actress Naïlia Harzoune (Patientsby Grand Corps Malade and Mehdi Idir) and is called Halima. In a relationship for several years with Sylvain (Antoine Bertrand), Halima made him believe that she no longer had a family and that she had grown up in foster homes. “What impressed us about this woman was the superhuman effort it took for her to be able to overcome this tragedy.”

For the needs of the fiction, Bachir Bensaddek and Maria Camila Arias, who had first drawn a first version of the screenplay, erased elements of the real story, then added and modified them. “Maria came back with a new fictional universe. We used an emotional journey, a life journey, then we dropped reality to go into the truth of the film. Inventing things gave us the freedom to explore an intrinsic family logic. What is most important is the emotion, the empathy for the character. It is not an easy subject and I aspired to a little generosity towards the viewer. This generosity comes through this taking of freedom.”

Silence

When Halima discovers she is pregnant with a boy, she is haunted by traumatic memories. Although she would have preferred to go alone, the woman travels to France with Sylvain and their daughter Léa (Athéna Henry) to confront her family, who live in isolation in Montpellier.

If speech can be liberating, Halima has chosen silence. Like the spectator, Sylvain gradually discovers the extent of the drama she has experienced.

“The whole part about silence, it was Maria and I who brought it. As we thought about it, we said to ourselves that if we wanted to discover her layer by layer, as her family and friends discovered her in Quebec, we had to succeed in reducing that over time, and that only worked if she had kept all that to herself.”

Having lied to Sylvain and his daughter herself, Halima in turn discovers the lies of her parents (Fatma-Zohra Mimouni and Rabah Bouberras), including that of claiming that the father was a harki, that is to say an Algerian auxiliary who supported France during the Algerian war.

“The story also dealt with the harkis, but I didn’t want that to be an issue in the film. It’s too politically charged and I didn’t want it to be taken up in one way or another, to be essentialized. The best way to hide was to say that they were harkis. That was enough to make them pariahs in French society and to establish a closed-door environment. The harki is like the MacGuffin because it justifies confinement, but what matters is confinement, withdrawal into oneself.”

“I have an extremely privileged migratory background,” continues the filmmaker, who arrived in Quebec at the age of 19 with a scholarship to study cinema. “As in Halima’s case, immigration is also a reinvention of identity. What’s interesting in her case is that she invented a character for herself, but she had to go through the trauma to be able to completely reinvent herself. It was by living in Quebec, with a Quebecer, that she knew and told herself that she was going to be able to do it. That says something about Quebec society where, like me, Halima felt welcomed.”

In theaters August 9

Drama

The Hidden Woman

Bachir Bensaddek

With Antoine Bertrand, Naïlia Harzoune
and Athena Henry

1 h 41