(Tunisia/France/Belgium,
102 min.)
Dir. Leyla Bouzid, Writ. Leyla Bouzid, Sophie-Marie Champion
Dir. Leyla Bouzid, Writ. Leyla Bouzid, Sophie-Marie Champion
Starring: Baya Medhaffer, Ghalia Benali, Montassar
Ayari
This year’s African Film Festival Ottawa opens with Leyla
Bouzid’s drama As I Open My Eyes. The
film is Tunisia’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film to this
year’s Academy Awards, which is a nice get for a fest in its second year even
if the title is unfortunately absent from the list of films accepted by Oscar
as eligible to compete. Let not awards consideration be your guide and
appreciate the film as a nice, nuanced, and wonderfully acted coming-of-age
tale about life in Tunisia before the Revolution.
There’s something in the air in the summer of 2010 as 18-year-old Farah (Baya Medhaffer) tries beer for the first time and anxiously awaits her future as a university student. The concern, see, is that Farah has a burning passion for music. She wishes to study musicology, but her mother (Ghalia Benali) envisions a life for the young woman as a doctor. Farah’s mother’s interest in seeing her daughter flourish offers a future for the young woman that many teens across the world would envy, but for this girl full of spirit and idealism, it’s a fate she does not accept.
What Farah wants to do is sing and she already nurtures her talent
as part of a band with several Tunisians eager to rock the Kasbah. Their songs
anticipate Tunisia’s Arab Spring movement as Farah fervently voices the angst
of a generation. The group offers an anthem for Tunisia’s youth with the song “My
Country,” which is an impassioned call for everyone to open their eyes and see
clearly the world around them. Naturally, it’s a dangerous tune to sing and
Farah’s instance on playing in the face of censorship and her mother’s wishes
leads to terrifying consequences that reveal the oppressive society against
which Tunisians revolted.
While As I Open My
Eyes shows the oppressive elements of fundamentalist corners of the world,
it also shows the fissures that enable change. Director/co-writer Leyla Bouzid,
along with fellow screenwriter Sophie-Marie Champion, favour an optimistic view
of the world in which citizens, particularly young Arab women, have the freedom
to express themselves and choose the course of their lives without fear of
reprisals, subjugation, or violence. Moreover, while the film offers a fair and
realistic snapshot of a contemporary Muslim family, As I Open My Eyes stands out from many films to tackle similar
topics in that Bouzid refuses to pit Farah’s father (Lassaad Jamoussi) as an
Evil Oppressive Patriarch. He’s an absentee parent, yes, but he wants the best
for his daughter and nurtures her dreams in spite of the social norms that
Farah’s snoopy, backwards-looking neighbours exhibit.
As the more overbearing of the two parents, the devotion of
Farah’s mother lets the film hit some quietly affective notes as the mother
confronts her own internalisation of these values that oppress women. Bouzid
develops the mother/daughter relationship intensely, and Benali’s unwaveringly
strong performance as the mother offers a fine counterpoint to the remarkable
passion of Medhaffer’s turn. Bouzid makes a cultural turning point of epic
signification a microcosm of intimate scope as the personal becomes deeply
political. The complex tempest of emotions between parent and child
encapsulates the restlessness and hunger for change that exploded in 2010-2011.
The small revolution in Farah’s household anticipates the greater movement to
come. This subtle and moving portrait of the dawn of Arab Spring is one to
which many eyes should open and admire.
As I Open My Eyes opens the 2nd African Film Festival of
Ottawa on Friday, October 14, 2016, 7:00 pm at the River Building Theatre,
Carleton University.
Also playing this
weekend is Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s powerful documentary Hissein Habré, a Chadian Tragedy. (Read a review of the film at POV!)
See the full AFFO
line-up here.
