With her film As I Open My Eyes, writer-director Leyla Bouzid has made what is arguably the best narrative film about the Arab Spring.
The reason it works so well might be because she chose to set her debut film during the summer of 2010, in the months before the demonstrations and the overthrow of dictators started to change the geopolitical landscape.
In many ways, the story is typical. Set in a Tunisian under ground scene of hip bars and bands that fuse Mezwad with pop, it follows Farah (Baya Medhaffar), a teenage girl who just wants to be able to go out, drink and play in her band. But she is no waster or dropout. Farah is an ace student with the grades to get into medical school.
That she feels like such a real character is possibly because Bouzid put some of herself into Farah.
“There are some elements that are biographical, not everything – the personal stuff is very different from me,” she says. “But one thing that is true is that I belonged to a cinema club and was good friends with someone. I then went to Paris for six months and when I returned I found out that he had been a police agent that had been spying on us.”
Bouzid was at pains to accurately portray the feelings of young people at the time, especially in the creative scene. To that end, Farah is a singer in a rock band. She performs songs that demand change, yet at no point does she get the feeling that a revolution is coming.
“I wanted to stay true to the reality that existed at the time,” says Bouzid. “The revolution really surprised everyone, especially the speed at which it happened. It’s true that there was a desire to push things to the limit – but we didn’t know that there would be a revolution. If I had someone say that [in the script], it would really have seemed like cinema.”
Farah is a necessarily duplicitous character. She has to lie to her parents, especially her mother, Hayet (singer Ghalia Benali), about where she goes and what she does when she’s out at night. Her father works in another city and returns infrequently – he can’t get a transfer home from Tunis because he refuses to join “the party”.
What is great about this set-up is that the parents can understand the desires of their child, because they, too, are rebellious in their own ways.
“I wanted to speak about youth and their energy,” Bouzid says. “But what’s also important is the parents and their generation and to show the transferring of ideas.
“The confrontational ideas– they don’t come from nowhere. They come from something. They came from a generation that had these dreams and ambitions. In Tunisia, there was a society that was very modern – then came a dictator, then Ben Ali. It’s a moment where everyone was involved in revolution – the workers, everybody was in a moment where they felt resistance was more important than fear.”
The director is the daughter of filmmaker Nouri Bouzid. Yet she is at pains to stand on her own merits.
“I did four years of film school at La Fémis in France, where I made a lot of short films,” she says. “It was important for me to create my eye for cinema away from Tunisia to ensure that I would escape the trap of being the daughter of my father.”
Her film is one of two having their world premieres in Venice that received financing from Sanad, twofour54’s development and post-production fund, which was formerly linked to the defunct Abu Dhabi Film Festival.
“Sanad came on board really early – they helped develop the script,” Bouzid says. “I was happy that the film was financed by an Arab country and that the story of the film was also relevant to other Arab countries, and they also gave aid in post-production. It was true that they really liked the film when it was ready and they were happy that it was honest and showed life as it is.”
As part of this honesty, Bouzid is not afraid to show parts of Arab life that are usually hidden.
“I think that when someone comes to see the Arab world and sees the people, especially the young who are so creative, a lot of people are very surprised because there is an underground that has bars that have a crazy energy,” she says.
“I wanted to show these young people and to do that I wanted to go to the place where they live. I wanted to show the life that exists and the people who dream, and how they live, and also to show the terror, which is not a terror that is about religion, but a political system that controls life.
“It’s a complete programme to destroy the energy of the young in the whole of society. To speak of that, it’s important.”
artslife@thenational.ae
