INTERVIEW WITH NADIA EL FANI REGARDING BEDWIN HACKER

Aricultures, March 9, 2002

Why this subject for your first feature film?

What fit me the most was its reflection on the power of computers and of television.  I don’t do didactic films. My starting point was imagery that was rather dreamlike, someone who had impossible, magical powers!  The idea of a computer pirate came to me as a way of speaking out.  I wanted to say that south of the Mediterranean you can find free spirits.  Our images aren’t broadcast to the North, which produces terrible misunderstandings that make people think that we are throwbacks and don’t live in the year 2002.

Thus, a desire to turn the North-South relationship upside down.

Absolutely.  And by means of that which speaks most directly to people today, with images that are purely Western:  television.

There is also the idea that immigrants can have power in a society.

I would have liked to have had the resources to do more filming in Paris.  Our North African story overlaps the one in France completely.  Our culture is—whether one likes it or not—very much Francophone; in France, though, that feeling is not reciprocated.  It’s as if they have no need of us, even though labor, tourism, and culture all demand a North African contribution.  Our contribution is refused.

This relationship is taken up in the film’s love story.

Yes, Kalt represents freedom.  She had the chance to “become someone” in French society, but she preferred a society where she is not free, but that in fact becomes the epitome of freedom for her.  Julia is someone who tries to contain the freedom of others, and Chams is someone who—like most people—believes himself to be free, but is deceiving himself all the time.

You tend to create characters who are free women.

Since my first short films, my female characters are more than free.  For me, making a woman’s freedom an everyday thing is the best way to imprint it into the heads of North African people.  I have no desire to document failure.  I can say that living in Tunisia up to this point, I’ve lived it.  Freedom is a battle.  On the other hand, in Tunisia, compared to other Arab countries, we’re very free, at least in our homes, even if it’s unspoken. I know many women living in a very marginal fashion, for example having children without being married, etc.

Your film seems to be a response to the internalization of the Western gaze in Third World films.

People expect formatted films from us.  No one in Tunisia ever tells me that Kalt is not really a Tunisian woman, whereas that’s something that I often heard from European grant agencies.  It’s not always said explicitly, but it’s there.  It’s been said to me clearly in public discussions.  I wear leather pants and dress rather punk, and do so as much in Tunis as I do here [in Paris].  We are not “Tunisia,” but we are part of her.  There is not just one Tunisia, and I don’t see why our films necessarily have to represent a majority of Tunisians.  Music, dance, cous-cous, the Casbah…I want to take up these themes, but in a way that moves forward: the women are in the Tunis Casbah, but are there to get drunk and eat a chick pea stew in the middle of the night; Kalt sets up a modern antenna in the middle of the desert; the father drinks with the women during a celebration, etc.  It’s a question of smashing the clichés while showing that such things are equally possible and present in our culture.  It’s reverse racism to deny our culture its modernity.

The European  grant agencies are composed of professionals.  Do they carry these clichés in their heads?

I believe that it’s a part of the politics of a country.  My movie was supported from the beginning by the Hubert Bals Fund [A fund sponsored by the Rotterdam International Film Festival, which “is designed to bring remarkable or urgent feature films and feature-length creative documentaries by innovative and talented filmmakers from developing countries closer to completion.”]; won the Intergovernmental Agency of Francophonie Award for the film and the script; a big New York festival selected it to help us find distributors in the Francophone world; throughout the whole process—from script to production to completion--I had help.  I didn’t have to pay off the people from the government grants agencies, and I’m not one of those who telephones…I really thought that if I did something really new, the whole world would come running!  I realize that that was going against a certain way of doing things.

The thriller aspect of the film meets a need to not be cut off from the audience.

My priority was to speak to young people, and in fact to some extent it pleases all audiences.  I didn’t want it to be daunting to a North African audience.  But above all, I wanted a North African heroine who succeeds.  It’s not a pure thriller to the extent that the thriller rhythm gets regularly thrown off, my goal being to show Tunisia:  it’s an x-ray of marginal Tunisians.  But this tone is appreciated in Tunisia: I’ve been surprised to see that my short films were appreciated despite their freedom of tone.  Tunisians have a great deal of humor and appreciate freedom.  I never insist on my way of shaking up the taboos:  it’s never itself the primary subject of the film.  We’re in the realm of the normal, and then suddenly we’re somewhere else.

Tunisian films, and perhaps those from North Africa in general, are pre-occupied with showing the beauty of the country, a feeling of attachment.

I believe that if I weren’t Tunisian, I would find myself drawn to the country: it’s a powerful feeling.  That’s true for the country’s beauty, but more so due to a certain gentleness of living, the human contact.  We’re very attached to our land.  This attachment to the land is very Mediterranean.  I feel it equally in Palestine and in Andalusia…

You make that a value in your film.

There too, I didn’t have the resources that I would have liked in order to do a better job of that, but I tried to set the action in the beauty of the desert and equally in ancient places like the Roman coliseum… The ancient past doesn’t appear enough in our films, while it is so much a part of us.  It inhabits us more than we realize, beyond our Muslim trappings.  Fatma’s hand, for example is anti-Islamic, along with the many rituals that hearken back to Carthage…

Are those places that you found during location scouting?

No, I wrote the script with those places in mind.  I often travel to the south.  Midès, the village where we shot, which is abandoned now, was very much degraded by erosion.  We had to reconstruct certain locations, such as the house.

Are the actors Tunisian?

We don’t have a lot of choice, given the small number of films shot, and consequently a small number of actors.  Sonia Hamza, the lead, had never done a film, but since I got to know her two years before shooting, we had time to work together.  The French actors were found through a casting call in France.  But I preferred to use actors without a lot of experience so as not to emphasize the difference.  Everyone got on well, and a certain natural feeling came out of it.  The digital camera gave me the freedom to do a large number of takes, which would have been a handicap with experienced actors, but worked well with actors who were releasing themselves little by little. 

Digital wasn’t a problem for the landscapes?

On the contrary.  It was a great experience in terms of the image.  If I’d had more money for post-production, I would have been even happier to have shot in digital.  It was a choice: the subject of the story is digital, the music is electronic, the image…

The choice of electronic music is also a break with Tunisian cinema.

It’s my culture, and it’s in sync with what’s happening right now, notably in Algeria.  I love this mixture.  Amina sings in the film, which made a magnificent clip.  On the other hand, I worked with a French musician who sampled Arab music, the opposite of Middle Eastern music impregnated with rock.   I wanted it to pop, and thereby to correspond with Kalt’s personality.

Did post-production take place in France?

Yes, that wasn’t planned, and it cost a lot, even though my overall budget didn’t even reach 4 million francs!  We had to juggle incredibly in order to manage the electronics, 35 locations, constant changes in location, filming in Paris, in the desert… Of course, I didn’t get paid myself, and lots of people worked for free or just about.  The enthusiasm was amazing.  Accidents, sandstorms, etc., we had all kinds of problems, but we were very strong.  It was the post-production that was the hardest.

Interview by Olivier Barlet for Africultures, May 2002

http://www.africultures.com/index.asp?menu=affiche_article&no=2511

Translated by Michael Dembrow

 

RETURN to CFAF17.