In March 2020, when Hany Abu-Assad was midway through shooting his new thriller Huda’s Salon** production suddenly had to be put on hold because of Covid. The twice Oscar-nominated director was not able to resume work until several months later, in the summer.

“After finishing the film, I realised that, yes, there was a good side to the shut down,” Abu-Assad reflects today, on the eve of the film’s TIFF premiere. The pause in production gave him the time to develop his characters more deeply, in particular to add yet more nuance and complexity to the personality of Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi), the troubled young protagonist of the film.

“But in general, I believe the film suffered because of the shutdown,” the director adds. He himself was under intense pressure. Not only was he trying to make the best film that he could but he was also responsible for the well-being of his cast and crew in the middle a global pandemic.

Abu-Assad, a double Oscar nominee for Paradise Now and Omar, is clearly a perfectionist who chafes at compromise. In Huda’s Salon (sold by Memento), he is telling a brooding and intense story about sexual blackmail, politics and betrayal. It all starts so innocently. Reem goes to get her hair done. She is a young Palestinian woman with a jealous, possessive husband. She talks happily about her domestic circumstances with the salon owner, Huda (Manal Awad), who makes her a cup of coffee. The coffee has a strangely bitter taste… and that is when the story shifts to the dark side. One woman betrays the other, but both their lives threaten to unravel.

This may be a female-driven spy thriller set during the present-day Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories but it, like previous pictures, draws on deeply personal experiences from the writer-director’s own life. Not so long ago, his wife and producer Amira Diab pointed out to him that almost all of his films deal with betrayal. “It is a very personal thing,” Abu-Assad acknowledges. “This [betrayal] is a very major story in my life.”

When the director was a teenager, his best friend betrayed him. He will not reveal full details of the incident. “He was a coward and he pushed me into the situation where I was almost killed… and he ran away.” Many years later, Abu-Assad still sounds perplexed at his friend’s behaviour.

Yes, the director has always loved espionage stories. He is attached to direct another thriller, The Good Spy, about the CIA agent Robert Ames. “I feel like the thriller is my genre,” he reflects. As a cinemagoer himself, he loves films like The Fugitive, Donnie Brasco and The Firm as well as the sleek French gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville and, of course, the suspense-filled dramas of Alfred Hitchcock.

Abu-Assad also remains obsessed with politics - and sees thrillers as a perfect way to deal with political issues in a dramatic and compelling way. “I want to talk about the human aspect of politics which is betrayal. It fits the [thriller] genre 100%.”

Thanks to films like Paradise Now, Omar and The Idol*, Abu-Assad is regarded as among the most important filmmakers currently working in the Middle East. To the Dutch, though, he is one of their own. He lived for many years in the Netherlands and almost all his films have been supported by Dutch producers and distributors. Huda’s Salon is no exception. It has financing from the Netherlands Film Fund (whose CEO Bero Beyer produced Paradise Now). It is co-produced by one of the Netherlands’ most respected production outfits KeyFilm, run by Hanneke Niens and Hans de Wolf, and it has Pim Hermeling’s September Film onboard as a distributor.

“I am Dutch! I was 18 when I went to Holland to study,” Abu-Assad states. He learnt about art, literature and music “from the Dutch” and says that his biggest cultural influences are Dutch. “Both Hans and Hanneke, they have a sophisticated taste but also they like to please the wider audience,” the director says of his Dutch partners. “And sometimes in cinema, you need another eye with you.” The producers return the compliment. “Hany always makes films accessible to a broader audience,” Niens says of the Palestinian auteur. She admires the delicate and subtle way in which he deals with big political issues.

“What I like about Huda’s Salon is that he tells the story from a very personal, human [perspective]… he is telling a huge problem through the eyes of normal people like you and me. These people, how do they survive in this ongoing war [when] you have to choose whether you are on this side or that side? It iss such a smart human story.”

The producers had worked with Hany previously on The Idol. “I always admired his work and was really happy that he approached me for a co-production,” Niens remembers. “We had a good relationship and stayed in contact even when he was filming The Mountain Between Us (2017)."

When he started working on Huda’s Salon, Hany involved KeyFilm from the script development onwards, working with them closely at every stage of the production. Niens speaks with particular admiration of the efficient and sympathetic way in which Hany and Amira handled the breaks in filming caused by Covid. Luckily, the actors and crew were all available when production resumed and the film was finished smoothly. She helped him find a talented young Dutch composer, Jeffrey van Rossum, with whom the director immediately struck up a strong rapport.

September Film will look to get Huda’s Salon into Dutch cinemas later in the year or in early 2022. “They will wait to see the reactions in Toronto and then find a good time to release it,” Niens explains when Dutch audiences will have the chance to see the film.

Huda’s Salon is produced by H&A Productions (USA), in co-production with KeyFilm (NL), Film Clinic (EG), Lagoonie Film Production (EG), MAD Solutions (EG), Cocoon Films (UK). Sales: Memento Films.
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and the Netherlands Film Production Incentive