Respectfully, this was awful for the following reasons:
It seems as if Amelia was trying hard to get chosen by the BFI for funding so whimsically ticked every popular box of this era:
A Black
Muslim girl
Rebelling
Drinking
Smoking a "drug"
Seeing an edgy white woman
Falling in love
It was just too cheesy and obviously written by a non-lesbian. Maybe a woman who "used" to waste other women's times but not a lesbian. There was no emotion in the protagonist because I imagine the script was based on fetish or a past phase.
When asked about why the writer chose to write this story it's because it "happened to her"... Another non lesbian dipping her toe into the lady pond, fetishising lesbianism then going back to safe hetero-land. Her telling of the story made it very bland and for that reason, unbelievable however the topic and casting would obviously get funding.
It's easy and not-sacrificial for a white (yes, Iranians are white too), non-muslim (your received pronunciation accent means you were probably raised non-muslim), straight woman to tell a lesbian "Black, muslim, lesbian love story" because she doesn't have to live with the shame and other negatives that come with this identity.
The writer should have left the story alone because she did it no justice. It wasn't hers to tell. I don't care if her father was the president of Shiraz, the storytelling was inauthentic.
