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The miracle was that, from "Man of Ashes" (1986) onwards, Tunisian viewers also acclaimed national films in an unprecedented way, unlike what happened in most Southern countries where auteur films are restrained within the ghetto of art houses or exclusively benefit from the "prestige" of foreign festivals. Tunisian auteur films did much better at the local box-office than the best-selling Hollywood or Egyptian films, even so-called difficult films such as "Chich Khan" or "Soltane el Medina": they created a totally new filmic category Ñ mass auteur films! These films won on the local as well as international scenes through theatrical release in foreign countries, reaching a wider audience than that of the festivals, as was the case for big local s cinema02

uccesses like "The Silences of the Palace", "Halfaouine", "A Summer in La Goulette", (and later abroad "Red Satin"). The makers of these films were often honoured by an invitation to be members of official juries in major film events such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin. The golden age of the local triumph of Tunisian films stopped after a decade for a number of reasons: the proliferation of very cheap satellite dishes with "pirate cards" (giving free access to subscription-based TV channels) and video shops also offering the latest pirated films have kept the general audience away form the big screen. Also, the fact that ERTT (the national TV network) stopped showing daily promotional trailers of Tunisian films deprived the audience of their main source of information and incentive as far as national films were concerned.
The decline was also visible on the international scene. Unlike Tunisia, Morocco remarkably based the organisation of its audiovisual industry on solidarity (Moroccan cinema is funded by a part of the TV advertising income) and thus increased its annual production (Moroccan films logically replaced Tunisian films in the various Cannes festival sections in a healthy continuity as soon as 2002). Morocco also became a major location for foreign films, whereas Tunisia had been the leader in that respect thanks to Tarek Ben Ammar's achievement as a famous Tunisian producer of international scale. Today Tunisian cinema is far behind in structural terms.
Tunisia still has no national film centre, no unified ticketing system, no multiplexes (to stop viewers from deserting one-screen cinemas, as this was done elsewhere), cinema03

no diversified funding sources. It yields no more than three feature films a year, with the help of the praiseworthy (and steadily increasing) financial support of the Ministry for Culture and other national and foreign institutional forms of support. Economic helplessness is coupled with artistic disarray. So far, the success of Tunisian cinema had come from the generation of the 1960s film societies, fostered by a love of the great works of the silver screen, a generation born before the generalisation of television which introduced a new relationship to the moving image.
To stop the decline of the local audience and of the Tunisian presence on the international scene, new film-makers desperately and unconsciously try to mimic what they think were the "recipes" for the success of the previous generation, or the "expectations" of foreign festival programmers. Others explore totally new directions: this is what Raja Amari or Nidhal Chatta did in their first features and what can be seen in a number of short fiction films by newcomers, or in Hichem Ben Ammar's "ethnographic" and poetic documentaries. While economic reorganisation is yet to happen, the achievements of tomorrow's Tunisian cinema will surely come from this new "young wave".

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