The Kélibia International Film Film Festival continues until August 26. Each evening, a dozen works are projected in front of a record audience.
What impresses the visitor in Kélibia is the great loyalty of the public, at the amateur film festival. Each evening, a long queue scrutinizes the opening of the doors and then invests the theater in a festive but attentive atmosphere.
We do not badinate with the films and at the end of each projection, the applaudimeter gives a first index of the satisfaction of an audience which savor its festival to the last radius of projector.
In fact, Kélibia appropriated the film festival which is an initiative of the Tunisian federation of amateur filmmakers. Tradition dates back to sixty years and is now deeply rooted.
I was waiting for the fourth evening of the festival with great curiosity. Completely devoted to Arab films, with Algerian and Tunisian counterpoints, the program was available in a dozen films, with the added bonus of a sequence dedicated to Palestinian films.
From the first film, emotion and good cinema were there. “Happy Land” by Nour Khair Alanam is a magnificent-chased-crossed between three characters: a father grieved by the death of his son, a farmer who resells a cargo of apples at the market and is robbed of his recipe and a motorcycle thief who becomes a good Samaritan.
The characters intersect by chance until the final sequence where the coffin that the father carried to the cemetery was abandoned at the Happy Land threshold, a strange amusement park on the outskirts of the city, a place that seems abandoned.
With a remarkable direction of actors and a sustained rhythm, this Syrian film hesitates between humor and derision and constitutes a very completed work.
The second film of the evening is called “Once upon a time” and its director Ahmed Raggad came from Algeria to present it. In terms of image, this film is perfectly constructed with the structure of a new one, well sketched characters and plans that surround the universe of a family where the father is in conflict with his daughter because of the pretender of the latter.
Cage birds, musical instruments, the face of a child and the clicking of a sewing machine promote some ellipses and let the fable mature to the final scene.
A third fiction was on the program: an Iraqi film by Malak Mnahi whose title is “lost dream”. Two characters evolve behind closed doors in the workshop of a painter and speak of dreams. Warda is an idealist who poses for an older artist that she no longer knows at one point if it is only the image of the father.
A game of seduction settles in the precarious calm of Baghdad, letters are mentioned as well as a serious illness. Then the film stops on a brutal scene that breaks the momentum of joy of the two protagonists.
These three fictions, even if their matrices are similar, are not alike. They have in common their outlet that escapes the characters and conditions them and also a certain fatalism which, between overwhelming and renunciation, resembles an Arab archetype.
Two documentaries complete the program. In “Souf”, a Jordanian film by Muhannad Lafi, the portrait of an activist and his journey are erected in a rather linear way, without real cinematographic treatment. The film is limited to an endearing interview, it is true – which documents a woman’s experience and offers striking lighting on Palestinian families relegated to camps.
All the interest of this film lies in the texture of the person who is expressed but beyond, the spectator is more in the logic of a filmed testimony than in that of a documentary articulated on a method, a research and an aesthetic.
The second film, a Palestinian work, presents itself as the making of a documentary. Proceeding with successive abuses, the director Aymen Zawahiri explores, the camera in fist, a city in summer.
The objective focuses on buildings, looking for perspectives, penetrates the souks, seizes life in urban nodes and road stations.
No narrative text for this documentary punctuated by the music and rumors of the city. Many counterpoints too who alternate with the story proper and show both the film of the film at work and urban feverishness.
Modern in its essence and very contemporary by its narrative method, “summer, city and a camera” by Anas Zawahiri is part of a line of works which are in the same aesthetic line.
The evening continued with the screening of three short films produced by Palestinian Lab and made by adolescents. The first film declined in two minutes the dreams of some Palestinian children.
The second film was the most accomplished and erected the cross portraits of two women struggling with their memory of the intifada of 1987. From traditional embroidery was woven a metaphor on the duty to perpetuate uses and popular identity.
Finally “Visit Palestine” is a one-minute clip that praises the tourist beauties of a country but a checkpoint comes to shake up the subject and induce that the country promised by the clip is not accessible to its own children.
The Arab cinema evening ended in these images while the rest of the program was devoted to Tunisian production to which we will come back later.
