A few years ago, a woman approached producer Serge Noël after a screening of one of his films to tell him that she would like someone to make a film about her life. With a wry smile, he replied that most people, including himself, would. So she invited him for coffee, convinced that he would be blown away by her story.
In fact, the story was so dramatic, so tragic, almost beyond belief, that it hit him like a hammer blow. From then on, the prospect of making a film of it effectively imposed itself. For a year, the producer and the survivor met on a regular basis, recording in detail the different episodes of the latter’s life. He subsequently entrusted these biographical notes to the screenwriter Maria Camila Arias (Birds of Passage2018) and director Bachir Bensaddek (Montreal the white2016) to bring them to life on screen.
The creative duo took advantage of this The Hidden Womana moving feature film about the intimate and family reconstruction of a broken woman forced to confront the demons of her past.
When she learns she is pregnant with a boy, Halima (Nailia Harzoune) feels caught up in everything she tried to escape by leaving the south of France for Quebec, leaving behind without a glance the Algerian family she grew up with. To free herself from what could prevent her from being the mother she envisions for the unborn child, she packs her bags for Europe, reluctantly agreeing to be accompanied by her husband, Sylvain (Antoine Bertrand), and their daughter, Léa (Athéna Henry).
There, she must first confront the memories and ghosts that haunt the family home, then relive the austerity and climate of terror inflicted by her father, an authoritarian man, withdrawn into himself and ostracized by his status as a harki, a term designating Algerians who fought alongside the French during the Algerian War. Above all, Halima seeks to find her older brother, Rachid, the one who branded her soul with a hot iron.
Overcoming a Wounded Identity
To tell this tragic story, marked by violence, Bachir Bensaddek opted for restraint, the unsaid, fully investing, in both form and content, in the psychological development of his protagonist, without minimizing the extent of what weakens her.
“What interested us was not so much making a film about a young woman who was being tortured, but rather showing how someone can overcome this identity,” explains the director. “I had decided from the start that I would not show the most serious abuse head-on, but that I would instead try to depict the way in which Halima carries these wounds in her flesh, even if that means holding the truth hostage at times, so that the viewer can retrace the journey with her to the source of her drama, and towards healing.”
Driven by a quest that is beyond her, whose rules and consequences she controls neither, Halima advances towards its resolution as if through a funnel; a metaphor reflected in the visual device of the film, from the sets to the framing, including the lighting.
“Very early on, I saw this woman’s destiny unfold as if she were being sucked into a long corridor. I even dreamed of having removable walls to play with perspective by following the character’s state of mind. But I didn’t have the means, because we had to build the house in Montpellier entirely with artificial sets, bring in doors and windows, and a bathtub, found in dumps in France, and wallpaper stored since the 1970s in Spain.”
For the filmmaker, the motif of the corridor, which is repeated several times in the film, perfectly represented the journey of his heroine. “At the end, there is something she does not want to see, but she has no choice but to move forward, she is dragged forward. At the same time, the walls close in on her, her perception of the world becomes more and more narrow and she has difficulty communicating. But this passage is necessary to reach the light.”
Heal the child
The main challenge was to find an actress capable of carrying and reflecting the depth of this inner world, with the modesty required by the script. “I needed a French woman of Maghrebi origin, who was both a force of nature, capable of embracing her role as a martial arts specialist, but who also had the gaze of a wounded bird, who could sense through her eyes that she had experienced trauma. I started making calls, in vain. Until one day an agent and a director of castingwho didn’t know each other, both told me about Nailia Harzoune. I watched a few of her films and I knew right away that I had found my Halima. And I wasn’t wrong.
To play her counterpart, Bachir Bensaddek approached Antoine Bertrand. “I wanted a character for whom we would have immediate support, because in the moments when Halima’s decisions are difficult to understand, it’s Sylvain that we cling to, it’s in him that we project ourselves. I also wanted to explore a form of role reversal in which it’s the man who listens and pushes for discussion. Sylvain is a bit of a metaphor for Halima’s immigration to Quebec. She is welcomed into a society where she can reinvent herself, find her own identity. Antoine has this stature, this enveloping presence that whispers: come to me, I will heal the child in you.”