Your Company
 

A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile

✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Canada · 2015
1h 24m
Director Sophie Deraspe
Starring
Genre Documentary

Sandra, who lives in Montreal, and Amina, a Syrian-American, meet online. Encouraged by Sandra, Amina launches a blog called "A Gay Girl in Damascus," about politics, religion, and sexuality in the Middle East, rapidly garnering worldwide attention. But when Syria enters the Arab uprising of 2011, Sandra receives word that Amina has been kidnapped…

Stream A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

75

San Francisco Chronicle by

The film falters a bit near the end, when it dwells on the romantic fallout of the affair, but all in all, “Amina” is an enterprising movie that makes this Internet story cinematically engaging.

83

Hitfix by Dan Fienberg

Even though The Amina Profile works as a cyber-thriller of sorts, I think it's much more wide-reaching than that, a story about online identity, but also about the danger of media-constructed narratives, one that manages to salute both citizen journalists, but also establishment outlets like NPR.

40

The Guardian by Jordan Hoffman

Bagaria’s personal journey has none of the gravitas on screen that the director wants it to have, especially when set against the backdrop of actual human rights crises in Damascus.

70

The New York Times by Ken Jaworowski

Even knowing the secret of A Gay Girl in Damascus doesn’t make this documentary any less tense. That’s a testament to Sophie Deraspe, a director who understands how to let a plot unfold.

67

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

Beyond treating this story like a potboiler, Deraspe does her best to make A Gay Girl In Damascus cinematic. She alternates nicely framed and photographed interviews with some fairly expressive dramatic reenactments. Some of these are pretty powerful.

75

RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley

A compelling and insightful examination of this strange story, and it utilizes the cooperation of Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian woman who had been in a long-distance romantic relationship with Amina (even though the two had never met.)

Users who liked this film also liked