Amina is documentary filmmaking of the highest sort, an opportunity to expand the horizons of and provoke response from the viewer through the generous and honest reflections of the participants.

| Jan 14, 2021

Deraspe and Bagaria captured my heart and mind on their torturous journey, and the conclusion was far deeper than those opening frames ever alluded to.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 24, 2018

The Amina Profile is a fascinating look at a bizarre and intriguingly shocking story.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 14, 2018

It's a gripping film, even with the knowledge of how it ends.

| Nov 15, 2016

Sophie Deraspe's elegant, angry work is part doomed relationship saga, part searing insight into the identity manipulation inherent to the faceless impersonality of the www.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2016

Catfishing is taken to a whole new level in this disturbingly personal doc.

| Sep 25, 2015

Sophie Deraspe's fascinating, frequently infuriating documentary A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile is a prime example of Why We Can't Have Nice Things.

| Aug 21, 2015

The film tries too hard to sensationalize a real-life story that has already been sensationalized enough - the kind that's too strange for fiction - but in doing so undermines the narrative's own weirdness.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 21, 2015

The film is reminiscent of Catfish in its essential circumstances of love and online deception, but it goes far deeper into how virtual lies cause tangible problems.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 20, 2015

Amina may not be a politically courageous activist, and how that came to be discovered is fascinating. But what the story says about the degradation of journalism in the internet age is even more important.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2015

Even as its use of reenactment, narration, and text continue to complicate the genre, A Gay Girl in Damascus raises other questions, too, regarding other sorts of storytelling, in news, social media, and political movements.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 29, 2015

Even those who followed Amina's rise and fall in the ultimately chastened media will find Gay Girl a nifty piece of detective work.

| Jul 26, 2015

"A Gay Girl in Damascus" is like "Catfish" but with global implications.

| Original Score: B | Jul 24, 2015

There are no easy answers, which makes Deraspe's attempt to provide us with one so frustrating.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 24, 2015

"The Amina Profile" is interested in every level of this complex emotionally-fraught story. This is not just the story of the "catfishing" of Sandra Bagaria. Everyone was catfished.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 24, 2015

Sophie Deraspe's film is a compelling anatomy of an Internet hoax - one that grabbed headlines amid the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring.

| Jul 23, 2015

Even knowing what I knew (or thought I knew) before seeing "A Gay Girl in Damascus," it's full of surprises.

| Jul 23, 2015

Even knowing the secret of "A Gay Girl in Damascus" doesn't make this documentary any less tense. That's a testament to Sophie Deraspe, a director who understands how to let a plot unfold.

| Jul 23, 2015

A serious, fascinating, slightly lurid documentary for devoted Al Jazeera viewers and fans of the movie Her.

| Jul 23, 2015

A Gay Girl In Damascus raises a number of important questions about the unexpected, sometimes-troubling byproducts of lives increasingly spent in the virtual world.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 23, 2015