Tunisia Way

starring his own daughter Haydé, and so became one of the early "indigenous" film-makers of the African continent (the first feature film to which contributed an Egyptian director was only made in 1927). Later, in 1949, seven years before it acquired its political independence, Tunisia was already one of the countries in the African continent with the biggest number of film societies.Tahar Cheriaa, the president of the federation of film societies and later in charge of the cinema department at the Ministry for Culture, was set to become the "father" of the first Tunisian film productions (Omar Khlifi's "L'Aube", the first Tunisian feature film, was made in 1967) and the founder of the very first Pan-African and Pan-Arab film festival, the "Journées cinématographiques de Carthage" (JCC, the Carthage Film Days) which are now as popular as they were in 1966. The film societies and the JCC contributed to training demanding film-makers and film-goers. Right from the beginning, it was never a case of mimicking the unique, "old" Arab cinema (commercial Egyptian cinema), a great provider of melodramas and musical films out of which a few auteurs were striving to make themselves known. The majority of film-makers would rather try their hand at successfully making, each in their own style, original "expressive" films (about politics, society, culture, etc.) bearing their maker's touch and aiming for the international quality standards. Apart from a few exceptions, they did so without taking the easy way out, which would have been rewarding only with the local audience. Unlike its neighbours in Maghreb where, for various reasons and in various periods, "epic" and "populist" films were made, such categories are virtually non-existent in Tunisian cinema where auteur films prevail in an almost individualistic manner. These films are often very different from each other: for example, Nacer Khemir's aesthetic choices have nothing in common with Nouri Bouzid's. In spite of a general "family likeness" and common subject matters, it has been said that each Tunisian film-maker represents his or her own "aesthetic school", as we can see in the films shown in Nantes, which were all landmarks in their own time.
Such freedom of choice was made possible because Tunisia also has a kind of film censorship (different from TV censorship) which is undoubtedly one of the most lenient in the Arab world: scenes that are forbidden in other Arab countries (and edited out from Tunisian films screened there), revealing the celebration of female nudity ("Halfaouine"), homosexuality ("Man of Ashes"), political repression ("Golden Horseshoes"), sex tourism ("Bezness"), the destitution of poor areas ("Essaida"), women's right to sexual enlightenment ("Fatma", "Red Satin"), were eventually approved by Tunisian censorship as long as they were expressed by artists and necessary to the coherence of their work.
All these elements (a wide film-loving audience and great freedom of expression allowing film-makers to deal with bold subject matters confronting what remained taboo elsewhere), as well as the economic rejection of the all-powerful State and the active support of the private sector which enabled energetic producers (such as Ahmed Attia, Hassan Daldoul, Selma Baccar, and today Dora Bouchoucha, Ibrahim Letaief, Nejib Belkadhi, etc.) to emerge, despite difficulties, all these helped create a sort of golden age both for the artists and the audience during the 1986-1996 decade. Of course, during the previous decade, Tunisian cinema had already been a star on the international festival scene with several films such as "The Ambassadors" (1976), "Sun of the Hyenas" (1977), "Aziza" (1980), "The Trace" (1982), "Traversées" (1982), and "The Surveyors of The Desert" (1984), which all received numerous awards in many festivals.