Director's Works
Original Sin Amrou Al-Kadhi
Amrou Al-Kadhi is a British-Iraqi writer, filmmaker, and performer. Their directorial debut feature film LAYLA premiered in competition at Sundance and was picked up for UK release through Curzon, and has won a string of international sales in the US and throughout Europe. Amrou has several other feature films in development in both the UK and US. They are adapting their own memoir LIFE AS A UNICORN for Universal Studios / The Forge Entertainment, as well as the novel THE EXES for Fifth Season. Amrou is developing an original series with South of the River Pictures, and is writing a series for Pulse Films.
They’ve written a number of episodes for Hollyoaks, as well as the finale for the BAFTA-nominated Little America for Apple TV+ with Stephen Dunn, which The Hollywood Reporter described as one of the best 10 episodes of television in 2020. Amrou also wrote an episode for The Watch for BBC America, based on the Discworld Novels of Sir Terry Pratchett. Amrou has written/directed four short films, which have screened at Oscar and BAFTA qualifying festivals around the world, and have been distributed by Peccadillo Pictures, PBS, BBC4, NOWNESS, BFI Player and Revry.
When my mother, a conservative Arab Muslim woman, found out I did drag, she didn’t speak to me for nearly a year. It was the biggest abomination in her eyes.
Even though the irony that she looks like me in drag is completely lost on her, with the paradox being that I totally learned drag from her. My childhood was made bearable by helping my mother choose designer outfits to peacock around in, and she is one of the funniest and most “camp” women I know – she makes Cruella de Vil look tame.
In many ways, my mother’s femininity and her sartorial power was the way I accessed my culture as a queer boy in the Middle East, and my drag is a love letter to her. I often say that my drag character is a version of my mother had she been free.
But my being a drag queen caused shame in the community, and it
tarnished her reputation amongst Muslim friends and elders. And it was a sin – and in the Quran, if a child goes to hell, so does the parent, for failing them. My original sin would be hers too. But given I learned my sin from watching her… where does this sin truly begin?
After my mother and I finally reconnected, with years of separation and tumultuous carnage behind us, I asked her what it was about me being a drag queen that offended her so much, and she said:
“Do you know what I have had to suffer because I am a woman? Being a woman is hell. And you, my special Amoura, with your special brain, choose to dress like a woman, even though you are lucky enough to be a man? I don’t understand it.”
In this complicated response, I realised that so much of her emotional rejection of me was not based in hate, but a jealousy that I had found a freedom in femininity that she felt corseted by; my queerness, my drag, was a reflection of her fear that she had not been able to experience autonomy, and so she punished me for it my whole life. I was breaking the rules she had felt so bound by her whole life; and I had then found a career in breaking the rules – one in which I was celebrated - when she had learned that to do so could lead only to punishment. The thing that would send her to hell was sending me to stages, and I was being
rewarded.
On top of that, she never felt rewarded for being a woman. In her eyes, her son, who had been given the privilege of manhood, was being rewarded for his femininity, and she was never once celebrated for her womanhood, which was a duty, not a choice– she was forced to be the perfect woman, the perfect wife, the perfect mother. And my femininity would mean she was a terrible mother too - and I was sending us both to hell.
This is the terrain of resentment, blame, sin, femininity, womanhood and unbridled glamour that have impassioned me to make this short. I have been inspired by Lynch, Glazer and Almodóvar in creating this camp filmic creation out of one of my nightmares.
