The writer and director brings their debut feature film Layla, about a Palestinian drag queen in North London, to Reel Asian on November 15…
The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival (Reel Asian), Canada’s premiere pan-Asian festival, is on now until November 24 with a line-up of 17 feature films and 49 shorts. This year’s showcase welcomes movies from Pakistan, China, Taiwan, Canada and more, all telling diverse stories and connecting global communities.
Premiering on November 15, is Layla, the feature film debut by writer, performer and director Amrou Al-Kadhi (they/them). Layla follows a struggling Palestinian drag queen who finds creative ways to make ends meet and who is surrounded by a small, supportive group of close friends within the North London queer scene. After a corporate event performance goes awry, they meet a seemingly-dull-in-comparison marketing executive named Max. Despite their very different worlds, a transformative love affair ensues, which sees Layla shift who they are.
“I was always thinking visually about code switching and camouflage and how a queer person of colour has multiple intersecting identities and is constantly shifting who they are,” explains Al-Kadhi about how the idea of Layla was conceived.
The film explores complex relationships (friendship, romantic and familial) and the struggles that arise when they collide with identity. Al-Kadhi masterfully crafts the visuals in this film capturing Layla’s “camouflage” by changing the film’s tone from colourful, vibrant and technicolour to muted and clinical as the relationships progress. Despite moments of sadness, Al-Kadhi sees the movie as a celebration that “has a lot of joy.”
We spoke to Al-Kadhi over Zoom from the United Kingdom to talk about the film, switching from shorts to feature length, making a queer film that is commercially viable and their career trajectory.
How was the idea of Layla born?
It was so long ago that we started the project. It was like 2018 that the rough parameters of the idea started when I was thinking about what my first feature would be. I’d obviously made a lot of shorts and was exploring a lot of stuff visually in them about queer identity and race. Something that kept coming up visually was this idea of code switching, about people in different environments they feel they don’t belong in and people changing themselves. Then I came up with Layla, who’s obviously someone like me, being forced into environments where they have to change who they are in order to survive.
So, Layla was always meant to be a feature film, never a short?
I’d made five shorts by this point. So, I really believed I’d found my voice as a filmmaker enough to try and see if I could extend this into a feature and deliver a story that was entertaining and fun.
Was it a challenge switching from a short to a feature?
With a short, you don’t have to think about the story as much, it’s almost a poem or a feeling or a vibe and you can kind of just explore something in a gestural way. With a feature, you can still do a lot of that, but have to think about the audience in a much firmer way.
The main trickiness I found is you’re dealing with a lot more money in terms of people who are paying for it and as a result you have to think about the audience and who’s going to watch it, which is not a bad thing because films deserve audiences, but it’s the first time that I had to think commercially.
How do you balance trying to make something commercially viable to a wider audience, but also authentically queer?
I’m a queer person and I just write from an authentic place and I hope the specificity of that means an audience, whether queer or not, can feel the truth or humanity. With this film, I was consciously playing with the line between mass and queer culture in the sense that I think it is a very queer film in terms of the issues presented. There’s not a lot of trauma and it’s not what you would normally think of as a queer story…I think a lot mainstream queer films barter in queer trauma, so the specificity of the experience and how it’s about code switching, the kind of sex that happens and the minutiae of queer culture are specific to the queer experience.
Then I tried to place that within a more normative rom-com world and borrowed rom-com tropes. I tried to use visuals that although were fun, colourful and queer, and I think are quite accessible…I think the film in a sense is a bit of a drag queen. It is very queer, but uses the costume of mass culture in order to deliver that queer message. I hope as a result, it can have an audience far and wide.
Layla camouflaging themselves is a universal thing that people do when they meet their opposite.
Falling in love is quite universal as is having a family who knows you, but doesn’t fully know you. There’s a likeness to Layla that I think makes its queer issues not what most people would expect. That is maybe where some straight audiences would think that this story should be a lot heavier than it is, but I really wanted to avoid that.
Earlier this year, we spoke to two Indigenous creatives, Billy-Ray Belcourt and Devery Jacobs. They look for ways to showcase queer and queer Indigenous stories of joy versus trauma. In your opinion, why is it important to diversify storytelling moving from trauma based narratives of queer people to narratives of joy?
Given how scary the world is right now, for most minorities and the landscape we are in, I do think it’s important for filmmakers to dream and to present an alternative. You can always reflect the horror of the world back at you, but I think it’s important to dream. Layla is a bit of a fairytale, a dream. The London we present is all imagined and it’s like a wishful film. I do think it’s important right now for people to dream and have hope if they are going to fight for this world…I think drag queens in the face of real adversity have always approached things with humour, fantasy and resilience.
You’re a multi-hyphenate, a writer, director, actor and drag queen and the film is said to be somewhat semi-autobiographical. Why didn’t you act in the film? Why did you find someone to play Layla?
It was mostly pragmatic. Directing is really hard and it’s my first feature. I wanted to get the film right. As a director on this budget level, which is an indie film, you’re having to put out fires every day and deal with every cast member, costume and makeup, and a million things going on…I think it would have been impossible and I really wanted to prove myself as a filmmaker.
How did you decide on your lead then? What drew you to Bilal Hasna?
Bilal was the most complicated actor that I was brought, in the sense that during the audition process he was able to embody all the sides of Layla, whether that was vulnerability and strength at the same time to repression to expression. The real trick with Layla is that they have so many different selves going on…Bilal is just the best actor at embodying all those intricacies.
What was bringing this film to Sundance like? What was that atmosphere in that moment after it screened?
Sundance was the dream. You work so hard to try and make sure your film one day gets into Sundance. It was a really beautiful moment. You sort of lose sight of the film as you’re making it…The film is only coming out now and we wrapped production two years ago, so you kind of forget why it’s good and you sort of become over it. It was really wonderful to see audiences react to it in a new way and to see Sundance really champion the film.
Your acting career started in the 2005 film Munich, then you eventually moved behind-the-scenes. Why did you decide to transition away from being in-front of the camera?
Acting is so disempowering. When I started back then, roles for Arabs were really limited and centred around violence, terrorism and war. That’s not empowering. I wanted to be an actor because I wanted to be a storyteller, but I wasn’t able to tell stories in the way that I wanted to as an actor due to how limited it was. It felt that if I actually wanted to tell stories in the way that I did, it was all about writing them myself. Then I realized that’s where I felt the most creative power.
You can watch Layla at Reel Asian on November 15, at 8:00 p.m. at TIFF Lightbox. It will have a digital release in North America in early 2025. For updates follow Amrou Al-Kadhi at @glamrou.
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