Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

Hasna and Mariam are sisters, aged 9 and 7, running wild on the streets of Paris from a mother who doesn't want them. They are eventually sent to live in different foster homes, when Hasna's story (based on real life) takes a huge turn for the worst. "Traumatized by her past and the wrenching way Mariam was taken from her, Hasna copes by splintering off her identities — Moroccan immigrant, Parisian party girl, sexual libertine, tomboyish hothead — even as she desperately seeks to integrate them in the form of home and family. Using three actresses to play the adult Hasna, including Amer herself, the filmmaker gracefully dramatizes dissociation, both as a survival mechanism and as an increasingly fraught form of acting out... Hasna emerges as a fascinating but also troubling screen heroine, a courageous protector of the defenseless whose instincts have nowhere to go when Mariam disappears from her life." – Ann Hornaday, Washington Post.

You will have to come to see it to find out what happens to her, but the director Dina Amer uses documentary techniques as well as some clever effects to follow the changing life of this splintered character. If I say any more I will spoil it for you...