25/11/2025 - The Belgian filmmaker co-directed his new movie with his mother, and the duo talk to us about this experience

Mokhtaria Badaoui and Nabil Ben Yadir (© Michel Vertongen/visit.brussels film commission)

Nabil Ben Yadir presented his new film, The Baronesses [+see also:
film review
interview: Nabil Ben Yadir, Mokhtaria …
film profile], co-directed with his mother, Mokhtaria Badaoui, in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival’s Rebels with a Cause section, where it won Best Film. The directors chatted with us about this experience and about this project which offers a cinematic response to Nabil Ben Yadir’s debut, Les Barons [+see also:
film review
trailer
Interview with director and actress of…
interview: Nabil Ben Yadir
film profile], a movie released roughly fifteen years ago and depicting the everyday lives of three young men of Maghrebi descent living in Molenbeek.

Cineuropa: Where do these Baronesses come from?
Nabil Ben Yadir: When Les Barons came out, my mother said: "It’s a very good film, but it would be nice to tell their mothers’ and grandmothers’ stories as well."

Mokhtaria Badaoui: I felt the character of Hassan’s mother had been a little sidelined in the film. She didn’t really exist.

NBY: She doesn’t really exist at all in the film world. Maghrebi mothers often come across as caricatures. We wondered why it was that Baronesses weren’t ever central to films, and my response was automatic and very straightforward: if there aren’t any Baronesses in front of the cameras, it’s because there aren’t any behind them either! That’s not to say you have to be the characters you’re portraying, but if an entire category of people aren’t the ones telling stories in the film world, the chances of their stories being shared are slimmer.

There are lots of surprising scenes in the film which break away from realism and venture into a very poetic realm.
NBY: I think writing and shooting with my mother freed me up, too. It was a first for her; she had no barriers. Whereas I feel that the more films you make, the less free you become and the more sensitive you are to what other people might say. You run the risk of slotting into a mould. Typically, it was my mother who came up with the computer scene. At first, we were just going to shoot a sequence with Fatima FaceTiming her husband in Morocco. 

MB: I felt we needed to go to Morocco to shoot that scene, to see the house that Fatima’s husband said was under construction, which she was dreaming of moving to, and to show that the house was actually finished and that he was living there with his second wife.

NBY: As the director but also the producer of the film, I told her it wouldn’t be possible, that we didn’t have the resources. Then she said: "What if we went there via the computer? We could get direct access to his place; the webcam could be our eyes." But she said it with total sincerity, whereas I would have taken it as a joke. And now, I think it’s one of my favourite scenes in the film.

Nabil, you often say your mother was your first film teacher?
NBY: Yes, we watched a lot of films at home, and I’ll always remember we were watching a film starring Louis de Funès, and she explained that it was a film starring him, but directed by Gérard Oury, that there weren’t only actors, there were directors, too.

Art in general and theatre in particular play a very important role in the film. Do they help shift people’s perspective?
NBY: Having the Baronesses perform Hamlet is a way of placing them somewhere we’ve never seen them. It was important to us that they appropriated these great texts, for them not to be where they were expected to be, doing belly dancing, as Inès says in the film. I feel that Maghrebi characters in films, especially mothers, are often confined to social, almost documentary cinema. They’re not explored with magic, poetry, surrealism... As if they were just stuck on their housing estates. Again, that raises the question of who’s telling the story. When you make a film with a character like that, people will ask: "Yes, but who is it inspired by?", as if it had to be a true story. But we have to assert our right to fiction too.

(Translated from French)