Nora El Hourch, filmmaker: “They told me that a forced kiss was not a compelling argument for the film”

Zack pushes Zineb into the bathroom, closes the latch and locks it. He grabs her face, approaches her, she breathes in distress and clings tightly to the sink. Zack gets closer and closer to her, until Zineb breaks her nail from the pressure. “I had to face many obstacles to make this film. They told me that a forced kiss was not enough to sustain the plot,” admits Parisian filmmaker Nora El Hourch (Paris, 36 years old), in the lobby of the Pulitzer Hotel, next to Plaza de Catalunya. El Hourch has won the audience award for best feature film at the D'A

Festival

with her debut feature,

a profound reflection on sexual violence through the eyes of three teenagers.

Born in Paris, to a French mother and Moroccan father, El Hourch began telling stories “between the dotted lines of calligraphy notebooks.” At barely 20 years old, she decided to try her luck in the United States but, a few months later, she suffered a sexual assault that marked her path home again. “She was upset, she was unable to understand me. Four years had to pass before I dared to tell it to myself and then to the world,” she acknowledges and adds, “especially to women who have been victims of sexual violence.” She jumped into the void, the narrative, and she changed the summer booklets for celluloid. Without film training or financial support, she decided to film her first work. “I did it in three days, I didn't think about the impact it could have,” the director points out.

(2015), the short film about the survival of five young girls under guardianship in a sexist and hostile environment, traveled from the Cannes Directors' Fortnight to the world. “Society wants to talk about sexual violence, it needs it. And I understood that telling these stories would be the fight of my life,” she admits.

The first time she was in Barcelona she was 14 years old, a high school trip that took her to visit the editorial office of the newspaper El País in the Catalan capital

This April she returns as news: at the D'A Film Festival she revealed to the public

, the revelation feature film of French cinema of the last year and the first by El Hourch. The film continues the journey that the director took with her first fiction, addressing sexual assault from the perspective of three adolescents with different perspectives and family and socioeconomic contexts.

Amina, Djeneba and Zineb (played by Leah Aubert, Médina Diarra and Salma Takaline) are “the nun, the brute and the crazy woman” a curious trio of friends without coherence but inseparable: “They come from distant universes but they love and understand each other because In the end, they are women,” explains El Hourch. After harassment and control, Zack (Zineb's brother's best friend) sexually assaults the young woman, and the three friends will together face a situation that no one had prepared them for. “Sorority and support among women is essential to combat sexist abuse. We have all had experiences of this type and we share a perspective,” says the director. However, their bond is tested when Amina decides to rat out Zack by posting a video of him on social media. Amina and Djeneba embody the dilemma between reporting abuse and respecting the will of the victim. “When you suffer sexual violence, it takes you a long time to confess to yourself everything that happened. You think about all the factors—maybe I insinuated myself, maybe I'm to blame—but once you admit it, your world changes, you will never be the same,” El Hourch emphasizes, and adds “that's when you have to report it, because the “Women speaking out is changing society, it is the only way to end impunity.”

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the Parisian filmmaker covers different points of the spectrum of sexual violence. When the three teenagers eat in a hamburger restaurant, some boys their age approach to try to flirt with them but when they see that they have no chance, they begin to exercise violent attitudes with phrases like "you behave like a star but you look like a

chicken

." . The director says that her intention was to show a cliché discussion, “when they call you pretty and when you tell them to fuck you you become ugly,” she emphasizes. For El Hourch, it is also essential to focus on the most everyday practices and attitudes that remain deeply anchored in the gears of social functioning. “They are also victims, they have been taught that they should be the strongest, the most beautiful and the bravest. "They don't know how to react when a woman stands up to them," she points out.

Patriarchy is deeply rooted in social coexistence, the solution to uproot it is intrinsically mixed: “Female sisterhood must be accompanied by union with men, only if we fight together is there hope for change,” El Hourch acknowledges, “during I have received the support of many men in my process and I have had to face many obstacles from both men and women,” he points out. Being a woman, young and new to the world of cinema is not the best letter of introduction to gain the trust of a producer. “They criticized the script as stereotypical, people who have never set foot on the French outskirts said that it was too much for me with clichés.” Among the criticisms there was a particularly painful one: “They argued that a non-consensual kiss, which is not powerful enough to sustain the drama of the film”, obstacles that show that “there is a lot of fight left”. There are still many movies needed.