Dir: Nouri Bouzid
Tunisia, 2006, 120 minutes
Winner — Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film & Best Screenplay, 2007 Tribeca Film Festival;
Winner — Best Film & Best Actor, 2007 Taormina Film Festival
Young, energetic and restless, Bahta dreams of fleeing to Europe to escape the restrictions of his life in Tunisia. At home, his macho father offers nothing but criticism and when Bahta is out with his break-dancing peers the police seem to track their every move. Set in 2003, things come to a head when Iraq is invaded by the American-led coalition forces and Bahta’s European mirage evaporates. With his love life in tatters, Bahta takes his rebellious activities too far and quickly gets into serious trouble with the police. He becomes the perfect target for a fundamentalist group, which sets out to brainwash and train him to be a suicide bomber.
From this point on, Bahta’s story is interwoven with a film claiming to be the “making of” the production of the film we’ve been watching. It shows Bahta at loggerheads with the filmmaker, played by veteran director Nouri Bouzid himself, because he’d only seen an incomplete script before taking the role and he now realizes the full implications of where his character is headed. This courageously outspoken film echoes some of the themes of The Yacoubian Building, shown at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival to great acclaim; both films furnish encouraging proof that Arab artists refuse to be silent, and recognize that fundamentalism isn’t only a problem for the West.
“hot-button subject matter, a lively, organic sense of milieu and a brilliantly conceived and thesped central character.” - Variety
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Broadcasts will be followed by Peter Scarlet’s interview with the director Nouri Bouzid and lead actor Lotfi Abdelli.
Please note: if no air times are listed to the left, this program is currently not scheduled. Please check back again in the coming weeks.
