- 3 hours ago
Two Tunisian women filmmakers are at the 2024 Ajyal Film Festival with powerful stories that examine how war, repression and resistance play out for people and societies. The two films, Paris-born Hind Meddeb’s French-Tunisian-Qatari documentary Sudan, Remember Us and Montreal-based Meryam Joobeur’s drama Who Do I Belong To, a co-production involving Tunisia, France, Canada, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are unlike each other in terms of provenance, genre and modes of expression.
They also view sociopolitical and family struggles in distinctly different ways. They are, however, bound together by an innate celebration of, and commentary on, the spirit of human resilience. Who Do I Belong To was in the main Competition of the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. Sudan, Remember Us was part of Venice Days at the 81st Venice Film Festival. The two titles arrived in Doha with a reputation. The audience here had no difficulty is seeing why.
Who Do I Belong To, an expansion and reimagining of Joobeur’s Oscar-nominated 2018 short Brotherhood, revolves around a Tunisian family that grapples with the sudden return of a son who went away to fight in Syria. With him is his pregnant wife who hides behind a niqab and barely speaks.
The principal character in Joobeur’s short film was the family patriarch, who was seen as responsible for two of his sons leaving home without so much as a goodbye. In Who Do I Belong To, the director shifts the spotlight to the mother and the son’s silent wife and provides an unalloyed female perspective on what armed conflict and its repercussions do to people.
Says Joobeur: “I opted to look at the cycle of violence and its impact on people in a universal way. I took away the geopolitical labels and sought to seek an answer to the question: why does violence happen?”
The filmmaker uses tight close-ups of faces and hands and contrasts the sense of intense intimacy generated by that approach with the expanse and depth of a beautiful but rugged landscape against which the inner lives of the characters unfold in an unhurried but evocative manner. Joobeur takes recourse to elements of horror, mystery and surrealism to bring out the complexities of the situation that the mother faces in dealing with the unexpected return of one son, the disappearance of another and the strong urge to protect her youngest offspring from the threat of a similar fate.
“Violence,” says Joobeur, “is happening everywhere. It is universal. So, if you want to change the world, you have to start with yourself.” After the Tunisian revolution, she adds, society was gripped by a sense of fear. “Extreme liberation triggered extreme religiosity.” That is what Who Do I belong To addresses. In Sudan, Remember Us, Meddeb, whose past documentaries have foregrounded the psyche of Moroccan suicide bombers, the restlessness of young rappers fighting for freedom of expression in Tunisia and the plight of asylum seekers in France, focuses on the 2019 youth unrest in Khartoum.
The genesis of Sudan, Remember Us, says Meddeb, lay in a particular experience that she had during the making of her previous film, Paris Stalingrad, in which a young Sudanese refugee and poet figured prominently. “The refugee centre was below my house in Paris. I was shocked to see how the French treated the asylum seekers.”
That realization took her to Sudan to explore the spiralling protests against political and religious oppression. The revolution culminated in a shocking massacre of protesters on the last day of Ramadan in 2019 by a repressive military regime.
At the heart of Sudan, Remember Us, the opening night film of this year’s edition of Ajyal, are four young activists who use poetry, music and art as tools of resistance. These are voices that refuse to be silenced in the face of the atrocities of a government secure in the knowledge that the rest of the world is least interested in intervening and stopping their acts of brutality against citizens seeking freedom and justice.
“In Khartoum, Meddeb says, “I found women at the forefront of the agitation.” She then discovered the larger history of Sudan. The country has seen three revolutions this century – in 1964, 1985 and 2019, she says, adding that “women have always been in the frontlines.”
What Meddeb found most interesting was the progressive nature of the Sudanese protests. Not only was poetry inextricably intertwined with the revolution, gender equality (unlike elsewhere in the MENA region) was a given in public spaces.
“Poetry is a matter of life and death to the people of Sudan today, she adds. “The young Sudanese express their passion for freedom through the use of words.”
Meddeb travelled to Doha this week with the real-life protagonists of the film, Maha, Shajane, Muzamil and others, all of who have now been forced out of Sudan for fear of reprisals. Muzamil, an artist, now studies computer science and data analysis in an institution in Bengaluru, India.
Sudan continues to be in the grip of an internecine war but the nation’s young people, notwithstanding the stony silence of the rest of the world, have not abandoned hope.
