CRLDHT Newsletter July 25, 2023
After the revolution, Olfa (her first name) saw no harm in her daughters wearing the niqab, even seeing it as a way of "protecting" them from the rise of extremist Islamist currents. However, she later experienced very difficult times when two of her daughters fell into this extremism and joined hotbeds of tension.
This is the common thread running through the film by Tunisian director Kaouthar Ben Hania, presented in official competition at the Cannes Film Festival last May, after years of Tunisia's absence from the event.
The film, a blend of fiction and fact, representation and documentation, is inspired by the 2016 account of a mother named Olfa Al-Hamrouni, who publicly declared on a private Tunisian channel that two of her daughters, Rahma and Ghouffrane, victims of jihadist extremism, had left the country clandestinely in 2014 for Libya, where they were arrested, imprisoned and tried for carrying weapons in the ranks of the Islamic State.
This is Kaouthar Ben Hania's fifth feature-length film, and she says she wanted to highlight the way in which violence is transmitted within the family, and show how the male domination that oppresses women is often maintained by the mothers themselves. The film also highlights the indifference and inaction of the Tunisian authorities at the time.
Interviewed by several French media ( Le Monde , Télérama...), the Franco-Tunisian director illustrates the extent to which freedom of expression and creation have enabled a new generation of Tunisian filmmakers to flourish since 2011. Today, these freedoms are threatened by a cruel lack of resources and an increasingly stifling climate.
