by Jeffrey R. Sipe

Zona Norte
Wednesday, October 25, 7pm
Spanish with English subtitles

Zona Norte, Mexican director Javier Avila's fourth film and second feature-length documentary, takes a powerful and dispassionate if empathetic look at a group of heroin addicts on the streets of his native Tijuana's most notorious neighborhood, Zona Norte. Well-known on both sides of the Mexico-US border, Zona Norte is often called the world's largest red light district. The area is designated a "zone of tolerance," meaning essentially anything goes.

Zona Norte focuses on a handful of heroin addicts who appear trapped in the neighborhood between the border and downtown Tijuana. At times, Zona Norte, the place, resembles purgatory, the addicts trapped in the malaise of their addiction and further descent being their only option. The hopelessness of their lives is repeatedly made clear when overdoses are treated as just another moment in an addict's daily life. No one seems uncomfortable or even very concerned as they administer Naloxone and perform CPR on a motionless junkie lying in the gutter. Even the addict, once revived from near-death, shrugs off the experience as simply the cost of doing business and has a laugh when he describes having no heartbeat but walking around minutes later following cardiac massage.

Avila spent long periods of time on the street with the addicts, gaining their trust and cooperation, in order to depict a reality that most of us never encounter. He goes beyond simple exposition of addicts on the street, delving into their backgrounds, their often debilitating self-perceptions and self-loathing and the pain only heroin succeeds in washing away.

Zona Norte is a grueling 85 minutes long.

You Resemble Me
Saturday, October 28, 7pm
French with Spanish subtitles

Dina Amir's directorial debut, You Resemble Me, starts off as a story of sisterly bonding as Hasna (Lorenz Grimaudo) and Mariam (Ilonna Grimaudo), 9- and 7-year-old Moroccan immigrants to France, fend off racism and bigotry at school and the violent unhappiness of their mother at home. That the two girls are played by real-life sisters lends a naturalism to their performances that makes the two characters extremely charismatic. We want to protect them as they are confronted by school officials, physically abused by their mother and then sent to separate foster homes by child protection authorities.

The self-consciously bourgeois family that takes in Hasna has, it seems, their own agenda. They straighten her hair, force her to eat pork for Christmas dinner while ignoring her complaints that it violates her own religious beliefs. She eventually leaves the dinner table, taking refuge in the bathroom where she peers into the mirror and whispers, "I know who I am."

There is a lot that casts this recurring line in doubt, however, Amir chooses to follow Hasna as her sudden separation from her younger sister leaves her traumatized, ultimately splintering her identity into shards of Moroccan immigrant, Paris party girl, sexual libertine and tomboy hothead, all the while seeking to fuse these strands into a sense of home and family. When she reunites with Mariam years later, she is already on the path to radicalization though it is unclear whether she is truly radicalized or simply looking for protection from the life that has been forced on her.

Based on the true story of Hasna Ait Boulahcen, who was miscredited as Europe's first female suicide bomber in connection with the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, You Resemble Me is shot largely in hand-held camera lending the film a documentary look. But the director's use of three different actresses, including herself, to play the adult Hasna, takes the film far beyond any objective reality. Some critics have maintained that the use of three actresses is a comment on both the usefulness and danger of dissociative tendencies. But it might just be an observation of how all of us arrive at the identity we assume for ourselves. For better or worse.

It is an impressive debut for director Amir as the film demands close attention from beginning to end, not only to the evolution of its characters but to the cinematic complexities employed to tell this complicated story.

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Jeffrey R. Sipe is a writer/journalist, who, no matter how hard he writes, having grown up in Speedway, Indiana, still can’t get the sounds of race cars rounding Turn 4 out of his head. He has written about the film industry for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Sight and Sound, The Financial Times and other publications. He also once worked as the “boom guy” on a film that nobody saw, but he challenges everyone to see just how long they can hold a metal tube with a microphone attached over their heads.

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