Where are you from? It’s a question I’ve always had a hard time with. And since moving to the US four years ago, I’m asked it on a regular basis. Maybe it’s the combination of a brownish face, London accent and French names that throws people off. Who knows? But this question, hearing it asked over and over these past few years, has forced me to confront unresolved questions I have about identity: how I grew up and how those experiences led me to being a director.

People tend to like things compartmentalised and simple, but it’s never been that simple for me. I’ve never had any sense of a “national identity” or, for that matter, a sense of belonging to any one tribe. I’m mixed race: French white mother, Algerian father. So “I’m a Londoner” is my standard go-to short response when the question comes up. That’s the simplest answer I feel comfortable giving without getting into it.

“Ah, so you’re British…” is the reaction I often get in the US. I always bristle a little at that one. “No, I’m a Londoner.”

It’s complicated, so let’s stick to the short answer, bruv. I’ve never been able to identify as British, not when I was called “Paki” by Brits for most of my childhood. I feel similarly about being French. I’m a French passport holder, I’m legally French, but I haven’t lived in France since the age of two. I can’t call myself Algerian either. I grew up largely estranged from my father and, although I studied Arabic at one stage in my teens, I don’t speak it, which pains me.

Being a Londoner transcends national connotations. It’s a vibe, attitude, swag, banter

Add to the mix that my mother was raised Catholic, but isn’t religious, and my father is Muslim. Yet neither “gave” me a religion to follow, or wanted to dictate a cultural identity for me. My parents left me to figure out my identity. Neither claimed me for their tribe. So at a very early age, one thing became clear: I’d always be an outsider.

Eventually I came to realise I’d always be a Londoner, too. Being a Londoner is something I could always accept and own. It transcends national connotations. It’s a vibe, attitude, swag, banter. It doesn’t have a flag or passport or past atrocities attached to it in the same way. But I’m also a particular type of Londoner, one of the multicultural mongrels who came of age in the 1990s and found expression in the rise of the jungle, drum and bass, and then the UK garage music scenes. A common language emerged across races that bound working-class Londoners living within the “melting pots”, as opposed to those posh Londoners who lived in close proximity to us, but didn’t experience diversity beyond sharing a postcode.

But the question “Where are you from?” goes to the heart of an identity issue I have found myself forced to face all over again, when I was somewhere I felt more out of place than ever: in a white, privileged, Hollywood bubble.

Yann’s brother Eric and mother in South London, 1980.

Moving to the States was never a goal of mine. It happened after I made a UK indie film called ’71 [about the Troubles in Northern Ireland], which came out in 2014, three years after Top Boy. Surprisingly, Hollywood reacted really well to the film. Opportunities I couldn’t ignore suddenly presented themselves, so I packed up, left my council flat in London, and off to Hollywood I went.

Slowly, as the dust settled and the political rhetoric of the ongoing election debates was kicking in, I started to feel a strange loneliness and discomfort. I’d gone from living in a particular part of London that was a genuine melting pot of diversity, coming from a family of multiple ethnicities, to living in the most segregated society I had ever experienced. And – get this – I was bunched in with the whites for the first time in my life. Me? One of the privileged whites?

Don’t get me wrong: London is no mecca of equality. We may have diversity among the working-class communities, but that’s not to be confused with opportunities within my own industry. Along with many of my – shall we say “ethnically diverse” – peers from the UK, I had to migrate to the US in order to have a real chance at a career with some scale. Diversity in the industry is surface-level back home, as are the stories told in film and on TV.

In LA, there were opportunities for me. But who was going to be my tribe? Where could I fit in?

In looking for an answer, I had to think back to my multicultural family. I was born in Paris in 1977, and two years later I was an immigrant. My family moved to south London, then west. My mother is light, can’t go in the sun, whiter than white. My father was born and raised in Algiers, grew up during the war for independence from France, and moved to Paris at 18. I have two older brothers, each with a different father – one is Afro-Caribbean; the other is Argentinian and half-indigenous.

My mother and father broke up soon after they came to London, and I was fostered from the age of four to 12 while my mum found her feet as a single mother and immigrant. I had two four-year stints with different families in Essex. The first was with a French-speaking household, and the second was with a white Cockney family. I have never quite shaken the accent that gave me.

The families who took me in were decent people. But they weren’t my family, and they certainly weren’t my tribe. I wasn’t well received in Essex. I remember trying to reason with some white Cockney kids calling me “Paki” at school once. “I’m North African. I ain’t Pakistani.” Blank looks. “You’re still a fucking Paki.” That summed it up. “Paki” was how they saw anything “other”, between their understanding of complete whiteness and what they could clearly discern as blackness.

‘My brother was anxious to help me avoid the painful experiences of racism he’d had growing up in France’: Yann and Eric in Paris, 1979.

My eldest brother, Eric, who is 17 years older than me, was my hero growing up. Once my father was gone, my brother filled that role. He was anxious to help me avoid the painful experiences of racism he’d had growing up in France and was still experiencing as a young black man in London. He was there during the Brixton riots, and had his fair share of battles with racists.

I remember how confident he was when he came back from a stint living in New York in the late 80s. It was an important, empowering trip for him. He had discovered his blackness. He was wearing Spike Lee merchandise, reading African American literature, had started playing basketball and was wearing caps, which, believe it or not, was fucking radical in London at the time. His year in New York had given him an attitude and confidence that I loved; he’d found a personal way of owning and being proud of his blackness. It was unapologetic – and I wanted in.

This was round about the time that Tim Burton’s Batman came out, which was the same year Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing was released, the latter being the cultural phenomenon of the year and a bit of a game-changer. My brother came home wearing a T-shirt with the Batman logo, except it said “Blackman”. I remember thinking that was the coolest thing in the world. I wanted one! It was awkward for my brother, but he had to explain why I couldn’t wear that. He was black. I wasn’t.

“I know, but we’re family, right?”

“Nah, cultural and ethnic identity don’t work that way, bro.”

I really wanted my own culturally empowering moment; it felt like the missing piece I needed

All this confusion even extended to my name. My given first name is Mounir, but my brother convinced my mother to change it to Yann. He had experienced so much racism as a young black man in France, and he told my mother I would have the same fate as an Algerian. So Mounir became my middle name once my father left, and I was too young to have a say.

I wonder if on some level he was right. Would Mounir Hanine have been a filmmaker, too? Perhaps Mounir Demange would have had a clearer sense of tribe. Perhaps he would have been “claimed” or embraced by the North African community more? Who knows?

Through all this, I really wanted my own culturally empowering moment, like my eldest brother had experienced in New York; it felt like the missing piece I needed. So in the summer of 1991 I went to Algeria. I remember the feeling when I first got there, of looking around and seeing that the majority of people looked like me. It was undeniable that I was from this tribe, genetically speaking at least. But I couldn’t speak Arabic and, though I was making an effort to live as a Muslim at the time, I didn’t know how to truly be one. I was still an outsider.

It was on this trip that I first saw The Battle of Algiers, when my cousins screened it for me. My family was incredibly proud of the film, as are many Algerians, but they were particularly proud and obsessed with the film because my aunt starred in it. She played the beautiful woman who plants the bomb in the milk bar. This was the only time she ever acted in anything.

The director, Pontecorvo, used a lot of non-actors, something I would later do myself. I loved the fact he used real people and channelled who they were and what they could bring. Not only does this give the people you are depicting some ownership over their story, but the sense of authenticity and the experiences they bring to the process can help a film to feel truly immersive, rather than a story “told”, I think.

So I had “returned” to the family, and I would now come every school holiday and get to know them all properly and perhaps start to have a sense of tribe. Or so I thought.

‘I know first-hand the importance of telling the stories of people who are under-represented’: filmmaker Yann Demange in Notting Hill. Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Observer

It was 1991, and in the background a political conflict was brewing. The FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) had won the local elections, so the government cancelled the national elections. After I returned to London an all-out civil war broke out. More than 250,000 people died over the proceeding decade. Every time a school holiday came around, it was too dangerous for me to risk going back to see my family. I never saw them again. I have not been back to Algeria since that original trip.

Knowing my aunt had been in The Battle of Algiers strengthened my love for film. As absurd as it sounds, on some level I think I felt like I had discovered an inheritance to some sort of personal lineage in movies. It gave me a kind of connection and claim to film. I may just be projecting this on to it now, of course – the human need to try to make sense of, and find meaning in, narratives being so strong.

I never thought of film as a possible career path; the notion would have been absurd to me at the time. It was simply my medicine, my comfort and escape. Film showed me there were so many people living many different lives, and they were all really complicated. I found comfort in that.

My first American movie, White Boy Rick, was released in December, and is based on a true story. A father-son story set in Detroit in the mid-80s during the crack epidemic, it’s about a 14-year-old named Rick, the only white kid left in the east side of Detroit after “white flight”, who becomes completely immersed in the African American community. He’s an outsider, an “inside outsider”, like so many of my protagonists have been.

I arrived in the US to make the film at a strange time. Trump was gearing up to run for president, and a Brexit movement was brewing back home. We know how that all turned out. The landscape has changed. People seem increasingly reluctant to engage with the “other” right now, and there is a global shift towards nationalism. Everyone is tribing up again and calling each other out. Lines are being drawn in the sand.

I guess my tribe is the tribeless. I have come to terms with the fact that I will remain a perpetual outsider. But now I know who I am. I am an outsider. Yes, I’m still seeking. Yes, it’s still confusing, but what I do as a filmmaker is embrace that question mark. I know first-hand the importance of telling the stories of people who are under-represented, particularly during a time when the discourse is becoming increasingly black and white. So I’ll continue to explore outsiders in storytelling, in the hope that it may some day unlock something for me, or lead to some sort of inner peace. And I’ll continue giving my short answer to the question “Where are you from?” Because as you can see, the alternative answer can go on for-fucking-ever, innit.

This is an extract from The Good Immigrant USA, edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman, published on 7 March by Dialogue, an imprint of Little, Brown, at £16.99. Order it for £14.95 from guardianbookshop.com