In "Under the figs", her first feature film presented on Saturday at the Directors' Fortnight, the Franco-Tunisian filmmaker has set the scene in a field of fig trees in rural Tunisia where the majority of women work.

However, despite fig trees as far as the eye can see and the feeling of space and freedom that should emerge from them, the spectator is seized with a completely different impression: that of an oppressive camera that these women cannot escape. escape.

"I wanted to say: + Look, it's beautiful but that's all +. Our countries are like that, they are very beautiful but the young people are suffocating inside", explains the director to AFP.

In this choral film, the women are hunted down, harassed, some narrowly escaping sexual assault.

Love and sex are on everyone's mind but no one dares to express their desires.

"I wanted to address the theme of sexual harassment against women because, even if the issue is taken rather seriously in Tunisia, in the countryside, it is the daily life of women and silence remains in order," she says. .

Like picking a fig, women's bodies are ready to be +picked+ by men.

Men who are, according to her, also suffering from the impossibility of being able to live their sexuality freely.

Despair

Defending herself from any cliché, the director, born in France to Tunisian parents, says she imagined a "Tunisian and more generally North African mini-society".

"Whether we're talking about Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia, it's always the same youth that suffocates," she says.

The impossibility of being able to live one's homosexuality in Morocco is the theme of Maryam Touzani's film "Le Bleu du Caftan", which will be presented Thursday out of competition in the "Un certain regard" section.

French actor Adam Bessa during a photo shoot for the film "Harka" by director Lotfy Nathan, on May 19, 2022 at the Cannes Film Festival LOIC VENANCE AFP

Finally, supports actor Adam Bessa with AFP, it is "the impossibility of living as one wishes, the problem".

He lends his features to Ali in Lotfy Nathan's film, "Harka", which was presented Thursday in the official selection but also out of competition.

Through the fate of Ali, a young Tunisian who lives on contraband gasoline that he sells on a sidewalk, the film questions the legacy of the Tunisian revolution that precipitated the Arab Spring.

More than 10 years after the immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, have things changed?

Not really according to the film: corruption, lack of opportunity, endemic poverty... Ali is on the verge of implosion.

And madness.

His only option he thinks?

Leaving Tunisia for Europe by taking, like so many others, the dangerous Mediterranean route.

The film perfectly describes the workings of a society that prevents beings from emancipating themselves and leads them, inevitably, to alienation.

Above all, it shows "the despair of a generation that feels prevented from living", analyzes director Lotfy Nathan to AFP.

"I wanted to describe a society that imprisons, that does not really leave any escape," he continues.

Thanks to tight shots of Ali's face and body, marked by the harshness of his life, and the masterful interpretation of Adam Bessa, the film manages to make the viewer feel the brutal despair that grips the characters.

"Despair, helplessness... It's this feeling of being at your wit's end, of telling yourself that you've tried everything, that you've given the best of yourself to try to get out of it but that nothing There is nothing more violent than the absence of hope", underlines Adam Bessa.

© 2022 AFP