• Tweeter
  • republish

Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim ("Tlamess") at the Cannes Film Festival. Siegfried Forster / RFI

It was one of the most memorable films of the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. Neither in competition nor in official selection, "Tlamess" ("casting a spell" in Arabic) baffled the audience of the Directors' Fortnight. Ala Eddine Slim lives in Tunis and directs, mounts and produces his own films. Interview with the Tunisian filmmaker who presents us a cinema in full change.

RFI : After the premiere of Tlamess , a spectator stood up and said : " I am Tunisian and this is the first time I really understand the word tlamess and I can put pictures on this word. Do you want to cast a new spell on the cinema ?

Ala Eddine Slim : Not necessarily. I consider myself a parasite in the cinema and I would like to blur all that is conceived ideas and received ideas. What interests me is to post images and sounds that let the viewer think, think and live with the film after the screening. It's this cinema that interests me.

Tlamess is the story of a soldier who decides to desert. A very allegorical film with snakes, a forest, a desert, a cave, etc. Among other things, there is an incredible sequence shot where the naked man walks on a winding and stony path. And the viewer suffers with him, because there is a dizzying music that accompanies the scene. This way of the cross, is it a metaphor for our present society ?

In any case, this is the path that the character should take. This is the path by which he will mutate afterwards. The path is divided into two parts, like the movie. This is the first time we see the character crossing a cemetery. Even after the death of his mother, we do not see him go to the cemetery to mourn. The second part is the path that leads to the forest where he will meet after the woman. By this, I wanted to bring the viewer to a certain feeling, the very slow and very tiring mutation of this character. For this the plan lasts seven minutes with music that is only rrrrr ... rrrrr ... As if the forest called everyone to come. I admit, it's loud enough as music [smile].

In Tlamess , we first see a man who decides after the death of his mother to desert. After, we meet a pregnant woman and very quickly, we realize that this is not what she wanted to be. These are two characters breaking with the dominant society. Do you also feel at odds with traditional cinema ?

Not broken, but I feel more attracted to a cinema that is sometimes called a cinema of the "margin". It's a cinema that is experimenting all the time, a very lively cinema that keeps moving, mutating, connecting elsewhere. That's what interests me in the cinema. Afterwards, I also consider myself a little "lonely", like my two characters, and I like this solitude. It gives me fields of imagination that I adore.

A black wall appears several times : is this a tribute to the painter Pierre Soulage or rather the " black hole " of the human being ?

It is a direct reference, conscious and assumed to the black monolith of 2001 Space Odyssey , Stanley Kubrick. He is the major filmmaker for me. In the film, there are several other references to Kubrick, for example, the scene where a soldier commits suicide, is inspired by Full Metal Jacket . There is also a variant of mechanical Orange . The wall, for me, is the door that takes you elsewhere. Behind the door, everything happens, everything is revealed. Moreover, it is near the wall that the snake appears which is for me the essential character of the film. Many people ask me why I am referring to Kubrick. I answer: why not quote the master.

To talk about this film, to stay in the logic of the scenario, we should not use words, but only the eyes. How came the idea of ​​this language of eyes that replace words ?

Until now, all my films are without dialogue. I have been doing films for twelve years without dialogue, my characters do not speak. I find in cinema we talk a lot. Until now, I have not had the need or desire to use dialogues. After, for this film, the exchange through the eyes and eyes, I find that even in real life, the first trigger comes with the look.

You are not the only director at the Cannes Film Festival who stages another form of language or communication. In Parasite , from South Korea's Bong Joon Ho, a tied-up character knocks with his head on a switch to send a message in Morse mode. And in Whistlers , the Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu, Mafiosi use the language of whistlers to deceive the police. Do we live in a time when we have to learn to communicate differently ?

Yes, I think it must. Until now, it has been proven that today's methods of dialogue or communication no longer work. All this mess is because of the word we drown. In Tunisia, we say that after the 14th of January, what is called the revolution, there was the liberation of speech. I think that's not true. I prefer to go the other way and try to find other methods of communication.

You were born in Sousse in November 1982, what in your life has made you different from others ? Even if each film is different, your films give the impression that they are even more different than the films of others.

I do not know, but I try to realize all my fantasies, all my desires, all my desires. And I do not think if I'm different or not. I do everything naturally, without much philosophizing, without thinking too much about it. I am an element of a planet, the planet cinema, the planet of the imaginary.