28/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The young filmmaker chatted with us about her first feature film, which paints the portrait of a young girl having to face the loss of her big brother

Têtes Brûlées [+see also:
film review
interview: Maja-Ajmia Yde Zellama
film profile] focuses on a 12-year-old girl called Eya who’s having to grieve for her big brother who died tragically and to whom she was very close. This film by young Brussels-based director Maja-Ajmia Yde Zellama bagged a Special Mention from the international jury in the 75th Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section, where it enjoyed its world premiere.

Cineuropa: How did this project come about?
Maja-Ajmia Yde Zellama: I’d made a self-produced short film on the same subject and, after seeing it, the filmmaker who’s also a producer Nabil Ben Yadir suggested I turn it into a feature film. It seemed obvious when he said it, but it had never occurred to me to do it before. It’s a story which is similar to my own and to my family’s, I needed to tell it. I fictionalised a lot of it to achieve the right distance. It was a process of deconstructing and then reconstructing for me.

Eya is 12, which is a very particular age.
Yes, between childhood and adolescence. I was interested in showing how much more responsible we can be at that age than as adults, but all the while remaining a child. Her escapes are dancing, having a laugh with her brother’s friends… From the outset, I imagined Eya to be a child who was strong, the child I would have liked to have been.

Grief, generally speaking, is a time geared towards adults. Eya expresses her emotions more through her body than through words.
It’s hard to find the right words at her age. Generally speaking, I find body language really important; if I could get rid of even more dialogue, I’d do it. Eya reacts in a natural way, without asking questions. If she wants to stand on her head, dance, turn her music up full blast, she does it. There’s something a little animalistic in how she reacts.

She’s also a little girl who’s really close with her brother, and with his friends, which offers up an alternative view of masculinity, and of these young men of Maghrebi origin in particular.
I really like group portraits, I didn’t just want the film to be a story about a brother and a sister, I wanted them to have his friends around them. They’re boys and men who accept their vulnerability, which is an alternative image to the one we’ve come to expect. There was one reaction to the film which really touched me; it was a young boy who I’d come across through certain professional connections, and when someone asked him what he’d say to recommend the film to his friends, he replied: "Take off your armour and come and see this film. We pretend we’re hard but when it comes to death, we’re all the same, and it does us good to be able to cry too."

The film follows Eya very closely, she’s in almost all of the film’s frames. What approach did you and your director of photography adopt?
I knew Grimm Vandekerckhove’s work from Bas Devos’ films, who I admire and who uses lots of static shots. But I knew I wanted the camera to move, to be in continual movement, and to follow Eya. We spoke a lot about the emotions I wanted to get across.

You opted for fiction to tell a story we’ve often seen in the papers. Did fiction help you to move these stories out of the domain of news headlines and to bring them to life?
It’s clear that a documentary would have individualised the story, whereas fiction allows it to be universal. And it’s true that when the film was presented in Berlin, lots of people from all over the world told me how good it was to feel they’d been represented in a different way. When I was small, I was really impacted by the issue of representation, especially when it came to reading; I felt like I couldn’t see myself anywhere. It’s something I’m very sensitive to. And if I’m honest, I would definitely have preferred for my film to be one in a long line of films telling stories about people who look like the people in my film. I never wanted to be the first.