Zaafrane

Here is a filmmaker who befriends a Saharan family in Zaafrane, on the edge of the Tunisian desert, and films them in 2001—until disaster strikes: every filmmaker’s nightmare. He loses all the footage for an unexplained reason. The film is lost. He returns to shoot Un si beau voyage in 2008. But one day, while tidying up his cellar, he finds a few VHS tapes that had been used in 2001 to transcribe speech. Despite—or perhaps because of—the time that has passed and the missing footage, he resumes his film project and goes back to see the family after the revolution. The family is still marginalized, in a zone "excluded from the Tunisian landscape"... “There is democracy in speech, not in the pocket!” Has anything really changed? In Zaafrane, scorched by the sun, time stands still, even though daily life goes on. This is what the first part of the film captures, based on the 2001 footage. Women prepare food, chat and laugh together, listen to an elder’s poem, sew, tend sheep, weave wool, work in the fields… No rest, always active, always bearing the weight of their duties, like everywhere else… The poverty is stark. The men go to the livestock market… There is no music: only real sounds accompany the images until the muezzin calls for evening prayer. No subtitles: the film presents raw reality, without a plot, without a story. The elderly, the ablutions, the field work… Ghorbal’s gaze is tender, empathetic. He doesn’t focus on one person, but on the whole family. Nothing sensational, but the traditional departure to the desert is prepared—camels, loaded carts, nights under tents, women singing in a circle, their hair flying in the wind. Bread is dipped in oil and eaten. Children run around, everyone repeats the same basic gestures, without staging. “Grandfather, is it true that the one who asked for forgiveness and wasn’t forgiven is still a winner?” There, in a crevice in the desert, as women bake flatbread over open fire, they speak to the camera about their fight to exist under patriarchy. “Elsewhere, girls and boys are equal”... One young woman had studied sewing and found a job, but her family wouldn’t let her go alone. She dreams of opening a sewing workshop. Another refuses to wait for her lover to get married in Europe and return to start a project. A third wants to become an architect: “So that my family is proud, and all Tunisians too!” This large family has become a familiar character. This is likely due to the filmmaker’s sensitivity and his respect for proper distance with his subject: both participant and outsider, attentive and observant. It also stems from the presence of time: those old, grainy VHS images now hold archival value. The grandfather didn’t believe in progress, but he didn’t silence the women either. Twelve years later, two years after the revolution, he is gone—but the director of Fatma makes a bitter observation: image forbidden. It is no longer allowed to film the women, and none of them were able to achieve their dreams. And yet, isn’t it under women’s feet that a nation is built?