"Sortilège", the Tunisian filmmaker Ala Eddine Slim and the mutation of the imagination

Text by: Siegfried Forster

It is an extraordinary cinematographic work. "Sortilège" strikes us and confuses us while playing with our imaginations. In the film by Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim, eyes replace words and a deserter from the Tunisian army turns into a biblical Adam…

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Compressed in the form of words, the story seems simple to tell: a Tunisian soldier learns of the death of his mother, decides to desert the army and sinks during his run in a mysterious forest. On the screen, it's something else. The density of the iconographic narrative seems to drag us into a real black hole of perception preventing any usual reflection.

" I feel more attracted to a cinema that is sometimes called a " margin " cinema , explains the filmmaker who lives in Tunis and directs, assembles and produces his films himself. It is a cinema that experiences all the time, a very lively cinema, which keeps moving, mutating, connecting elsewhere. That's what interests me in cinema. "

Everything looks different

In Sortilège , the characters are transformed into archetypes endowed with shifting identities. The images burst history into a thousand galaxies, populated by dreams, nightmares, instincts and feelings. In short, at Ala Eddine Slim, a film does not look like a film. Everything seems different:

“ I try to make all my fantasies come true, all my desires, all my desires. And I don't think about whether I'm different or not. I do everything quite naturally, without philosophizing too much, without thinking too much about it. I am an element of a planet, the cinema planet, the planet of the imagination. "

Open the fields of the imagination. To achieve this, the director born in 1982 in Sousse, submits us to a sequence shot of incredible intensity. The soldier, now a simple caveman, walks entirely naked on a winding and stony path. We, spectators, suffer with him, exposed to stunning music that accompanies the scene. Before our eyes, the once banal life of a simple man is transformed into the Stations of the Cross.

Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim ("Tlamess"). Siegfried Forster / RFI

" This is the path the character should take. It is the path by which it will mutate afterwards. The path is divided into two parts, like the film. It is the first time that the character is seen crossing a cemetery. Even after the death of his mother, we do not see him going to the cemetery to mourn. The second part is the path that leads him to the forest where he will meet after the woman. By this, I wanted to bring the spectator to a certain feeling, to the very slow and very tiring mutation of this character. For this the plan lasts seven minutes with music that does nothing but rrrrr ... rrrrr ... As if the forest called everyone to come. I admit, it's pretty strong as music [smile]. "

" I consider myself a parasite in the cinema "

The woman met shortly after in a prehistoric cave is both pregnant and at odds with her wealthy husband and mainstream society. Each scene seems to bump into preconceived identities and the heads of spectators: " I consider myself a parasite in cinema and I would like to confuse everything 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 is this cinema that interests me. "

After The Last of Us , released in 2016, Ala Eddine Slim confirms with her second fiction feature film her desire to cross borders to discover unexplored territories. The filmmaker, who went through audiovisual studies in Tunis, before a short stint at Femis, in Paris, also confides his fascination for the American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick to whom he dedicated in his new film a black wall in the middle of the desert.

“ It is a direct, conscious and assumed reference to the black monolith of 2001 Space Odyssey , by 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. Besides, it is near the wall that the snake appears which is for me the essential character of the film. "

Freedom of multifaceted expression

Ala Eddine Slim's cinema claims to be crossed by lots of different universes. Without forgetting his obvious desire to create new archetypes himself, such as the sequence showing a man breastfeeding his child. Freedom of multiform expression reigns everywhere, speech remains confined to a secondary place. “ Up to now, all of my films have been without dialogue. I have been making films without dialogue for twelve years, my characters do not speak. I think, in the cinema we talk a lot. Until now, I have not had the need or the desire to use dialogues. After, for this film, the exchange through looks and eyes, I find that even in real life, the first trigger comes with the look. "

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