Swiss director Anna Thommen first met the protagonist of her new film Naima (screening in DOK Leipzig Audience Competition and sold by Utopia Docs) in an unusual way. In 2019, there was a national strike day in Switzerland. Thommen went out on the streets to film the protests. She saw a friend handing out leaflets to migrant women in support of women’s rights. Her friend was accompanied by Naima Cuica.
“I stopped my bicycle and I went to them to ask what they were doing and if I could film there. I ended up filming them the whole day and then we started talking…”
Naima, she soon discovered, was from Venezuela. She had married a social worker from whom she was now separated. Their split had been painful and bitter. Although she was an educated woman from a bohemian background (her father was a well-known actor and her stepmother was a filmmaker), she was struggling to establish herself in Swiss society. She was living in precarious circumstances in Basel, eking out a living in lowly paid jobs.
At the time, Thommen was part of a women’s film collective. “We decided to make an episode film where every director follows a woman from Switzerland in her daily life.” She chose Naima.
Naima was working in a canteen but had the possibility to train as a nurse – and potentially to change her life. The director and subject therefore decided to carry on filming. The idea was to keep the cameras rolling until Naima received her nursing diploma.
“It was really special for me,” the director says of the collaboration. Naima wasn’t just the subject of the movie but had a creative role too. “She is a character who belongs in cinema!”
The documentary opens in striking fashion with a beautifully shot sequence showing Naima plunging into water.
“My goal was that we would create a very subjective [view] of her experience in daily life and how she sees our world…and also the inner perspectives were very important. Naima told me about how it was when she had her depression, when she was really down, and how she felt. She said it was like you are in this swimming pool, you jump, and you just go down and down. We decided to use this image she talks about and stage it [to give] this inner perspective.”
The reason for the depression becomes obvious in the film. Naima is an ebullient, warm-hearted character who, as a trainee nurse, loved to talk to patients. Her superiors, though, were suspicious of her. She was far too open and too emotional for their liking. She lacked the typical Swiss reserve and formality. Despite her hard work, she therefore ended up failing her training course.
“It is definitely something I often encounter in our society: People find it difficult to empathise with other perspectives. Especially when it’s the perspective of an ‘outside,’” Thommen reflects on the attitude of her instructors. “I think the reason for this is that you would then have to question your own point of view and possibly admit that you make mistakes yourself in one case or another. By not thinking about how a migrant like Naima
experiences the world, you can make yourself comfortable in your privileged situation.”
The director herself was born in Switzerland. “I had a totally different background to Naima. All doors were open,” she says of the opportunities given to her but denied to migrants like Naima as “a woman of colour with a foreign accent.”
Thommen describes Naima as an “inspirational” figure. “She looks everyone in the eye and doesn’t think in terms of class.” Her behaviour doesn’t change regardless of the person she is dealing with. Whether it’s the CEO of a company or a poor migrant worker, she’ll treat them both with the same openness and respect.
The hospital administrators were initially open and friendly to the documentary crew. Their attitude changed when Naima began to have trouble with her instructor – and when she appealed against the decision to fail her as a trainee. “In their eyes, she was too warm-hearted to the patients, too unprofessional in her relationships.”
The hospital’s case against her was very flimsy – as proved when she won her appeal.
“I also think that many people are not even aware of this way of thinking, but that these are our own blind spots that we have to deal with if we want to say goodbye to our Eurocentric world view,” Thommen says of the bias and entrenched attitudes which almost destroyed Naima’s dream of a nursing career.
Although the film focuses on Naima, we also spend time with her teenage son Luke and daughter, Layla. The son proves to be a screen natural, “like his mother.” At one stage, he also shows his abilities as a rap artist.
At first, there is a wariness between Luke, who has previously been living with his father, and his mum. “The more and more he got close to Naima, [the more] he opened up to us.”
And, yes, the family has seen the film. Naima is “very into it. She loves it.”
Thommen received several awards for her debut film Neuland (2013), also looking at the plight of migrants in Switzerland. She is already embarking on a new documentary project, Deconstructing Caesar, which is currently at the research stage. “It’s about digging in the past,” the director explains., revealing that the new doc will touch on the legacy of colonialism. “But it’s very difficult to talk about…”
Naima will be released in Switzerland by First Hand Films in March 2025.
