Your mother is right: stay off the internet, it’s filled with creeps! The Amina Profile is the latest reminder to be sceptical of everyone you meet online, for you never know who is about to spark an international embarrassment.
This investigative documentary teases out the story of the internet hoax Gay Girl in Damascus – a blog that purported to be a boots-on-the-ground look at life under Bashar al-Assad as an out lesbian during the first days of the Arab spring. It turns out that the blog, which was reported on by many, including the Guardian, was actually run by an American male weirdo for reasons that are still a little vague.
Much of The Amina Profile is a typical “the way we live now” exposé concerning the porous and anonymous nature of the internet. It is fun to watch reporters trip over themselves once Amina’s true identity is revealed, after activist bloggers from San Francisco to Tel Aviv rallied awareness when “Gay Girl” claimed to have been taken in by police. But the film’s unique perspective comes from its true subject, Sandra Bagaria, a French woman living in Montreal who described herself as Amina’s girlfriend.
While the two never met in person, Bagaria exchanged countless emails and IMs, many of a frank sexual nature, with someone who turned out to be a married heterosexual man named Tom MacMaster, and not a raven-haired Syrian suffering prejudice. This catfishing puts a human face on the hoax, and Bagaria’s eventual confrontation of MacMaster gives the film its cathartic climax.
For Bagaria, in the real world, I’m sure it was quite a moment, but as cinema, it’s more of a shrug. The Amina Profile is one of the few documentaries I’ve seen in which the director appears on-screen to play a scene back and essentially dictate to an audience: “You see this? This is really emotional here!” But in fact, 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.
I don’t want to sound like a monster, and surely no one deserves to have their emotions exploited for someone else’s amusement. But to get so worked up over someone you’ve never even met (or Skyped) is all the more cause to remember what your mother says: stay away from people on the internet!
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