Interview of Hebah Ali by Freya Bennett
Hebah Ali is a writer, director, and filmmaker from Dharug country in Western Sydney whose work explores the messy, imperfect, and deeply human sides of women. Her latest short film, Rage Bait, which premieres worldwide at SXSW Sydney this October, follows a girl whose obsession with provoking outrage online begins to sabotage her personal relationships. Through her storytelling, Ali shines a light on complex female characters, particularly women of colour, who are often sidelined in mainstream cinema, and invites audiences to reflect on empathy, identity, and the connections we seek in both the digital and real world.
What first drew you to filmmaking, and what do you love most about telling stories through film?
As a kid, I always loved telling stories – I wanted to be an author, but something about the medium felt limiting to me – that then transformed into wanting to be a photographer! But my mum said no. Eventually those passions, along with an affinity for going to the movies, morphed into a desire for filmmaking. Telling stories through filmmaking feels like therapy; both as a filmmaker and a viewer. You get to inject the weirdest and wackiest parts of you into the characters on screen and they kind of become a vessel for you to find empathy and acceptance in those ‘ugly’ parts of you.
Rage Bait has such a striking premise: a girl addicted to rage-baiting online. Where did the idea come from?
Aside from my brief stint as an internet micro-celebrity (no time to get into this), I have a theory that anything anyone posts online ever is a bid for connection. I do it, you do it, we all do it. I don’t think there’s any moral value to this, other than it is very human to want to connect with others. Each photo, story, tweet, blog, comment etc is a bid for connection with an individual or community. I am fascinated by ‘trolling’ culture and wanted to dig a little deeper into why someone might post/comment something to intentionally outrage, but more than that I was curious about how this permeates in our personal relationships. We all know someone who knows how to get under our skin in just the right way, and odds are, they might be pretty close to us; not just a faceless stranger on the internet. Jess, the protagonist (debatable) of the film, felt like the perfect vehicle to draw the link between these two ideas.
You often depict complex, imperfect women. Why is it important for you to show this kind of female character on screen?
I am obsessed with stories about Messy Women. It consumes the types of books I read, and the stories I’m drawn to. I find in the literary world there is more room for this archetype of woman to exist, than there is in film, particularly for women of colour. As a South-Asian, Muslim woman in film, I feel I need to create permission to make Muslim women and Women of Colour the multi-dimensional characters we are in real life. Sifting through the most successful films (largely in the West) that contain complex women at their centre, a large majority of these women are white women. I think when we are able to see alternate, ‘messy’ versions of ourselves on screen, we stop existing as one-note stereotypes in the minds of others and broaden the scope of what is possible for us.
Can you tell us a little about Burqini Body and what inspired that story?
Burqini Body is a five minute short about a Muslim woman at her local swimming pool, feeling alienated in her modest swimwear. The film is a comedy that draws from horror elements from 70’s creature features, however at its core, the film is about a reclamation of identity and agency in the face of xenophobia. The story is inspired by my connection to public pools and the beach as a kid. I felt a sense of alienation when I would be swimming in a rash shirt and boardies and other girls my age would be in cute bikinis and one pieces. Also around this time growing up, Muslims at large faced Islamophobia and xenophobia during the Cronulla riots so these spaces felt very exclusionary. Burqini Body seeks to reclaim what it means to be a Muslim woman at the pools, wearing whatever we want, no matter how uncomfortable it makes others.
How does your perspective as a Western Sydney filmmaker shape the stories you tell?
Being born and raised in Western Sydney, I never truly realised how much of a melting pot of culture it was until I went to uni and found myself for the first time feeling different. It wasn’t a negative experience per se, it was just realising that the way I grew up was not the default – many people I met hadn’t known a Muslim person before they met me. It was in this space I came to recognise just how rich and vibrant our experiences and stories are, and that I didn’t have to go far at all to find stories of substance that were worth sharing.
What was the most challenging part of bringing Rage Bait to life, and how did you navigate it?
Honestly, I found many parts of it daunting but I think the biggest challenge I faced was “believing in myself” – which is absolutely worthy of an eyeroll. I hadn’t made anything for 4 years at that point, my first experience directing a short in 2020 was for uni and that entailed a lot of ‘figuring it out’ and trial and error – heavy on error. I had abandoned my writer/director proclivities as I worked in production design for four years and it wasn’t until early 2024 when I had drafted up Rage Bait, my friend (and producer!) Zac Perry really nudged me to share it with him. It was the first time in a long while I had reconnected with the prospect of being a writer – and that quickly snowballed into stepping into being a director as Zac and the team at Praxis Pictures really backed me and the story. I hadn’t felt creatively validated like that, especially by people I didn’t particularly know that well (at the time), and whose works I also admired! I think finding a community that were in service to something larger than themselves was a huge part of what made me feel safe to create again.
What conversations or reflections do you hope your films spark in audiences?
I think if my work can get someone to play Devil’s Advocate, then I would consider that a success. It’s become quite contentious to try and identify with a perspective that’s on the opposite side of the fence to you, and I understand and empathise with why that is. I also am not sure if it’s helpful to be further edging into the binaries that keep us apart. Beyond the buzziness and edge-lord-iness of being a contrarian, I think the value in considering a different perspective is that it reconnects us to empathy – which is kind of everything I write about. I hope my work can spark good-faith conversations about things and people we don’t quite understand with the intention to try and understand them a bit better.
When you hit creative burnout or self-doubt, how do you find your way back to inspiration?
I am, like many creative people, still on this journey and I think it’ll be a lifelong one. For now, I find that removing myself from the environment that has created burn-out and self-doubt is so important. Travelling and meeting new people has been incredible for me and my creativity, though I definitely can’t do that at the drop of a hat. I think what it all points toward is experiencing things outside of yourself and your disciplinary. I don’t watch movies to make good movies, I watch animals and strangers and landscapes and kids and the elderly, and bugs and grass. Sometimes you literally just need to watch grass grow. I guess if I were to simplify it, it would just be to decentre myself in order to make room for whatever else will eventually strike.
