In Tunis the week before last, Youssef Rakha met with Nejib Belkadhi, a nationally celebrated filmmaker who challenges not only artistic convention but the social status quo It was right after the Marcel Khalifa press conference, held at a five-star resort outside La Marsa, that I dragged my festival-appointed murafqa (escort) along to the headquarters of Propaganda Productions, Nejib Belkadhi's company in the town centre. An ancient neighbourhood of Punic Carthage, a seventh-century Roman port and later a residence for Tunisia's Ottoman Bey, this is one of the more picturesque suburbs of contemporary Tunis. The road afforded some of the most breathtaking seascapes encountered around the city. Unlike the nearby Sidi Bou Said, I was later to find out, La Marsa has not been a tourist centre for long; it is consequently more affordable and significantly quieter than the other suburb. Yet few if any artists had taken up residence there when Belkadhi, in collaboration with Emed Merzouk, founded Propaganda Productions in 2002. "We work freely as individuals, not only from within the company," Belkadhi was to explain. "That way we can afford to run -- a procedure, mind you, not all that costly in Tunis. Establishing Propaganda Productions was not altogether so difficult, in fact. We started with $8,000 in capital. Before, it used to be necessary to have several official permits issued. By the time we started, we only had to look through the official kurrasit shurout (book of conditions) and make sure we abided by the legal requirements." Belkadhi was described to me as the controversial face of Tunisian film; and when I cited his name, though it solicited the kind of embarrassment that usually stands over the risqué, he turned out to be quite well-known. I had contacted him on a tip from a mutual, Lebanese-Palestinian friend, with no clear purpose in view. An affable, cosmopolitan man in his thirties, he was nonetheless welcoming, and offered generously of both his time and work in progress. Happily for the visitor, Belkadhi was more open than most regarding the present-day social-political conditions of Tunisia and its recent history -- something that quickly involved my 22-year- old, emphatically emancipated murafqa, who, in bringing up the politics of gender, an otherwise gripping topic, inadvertently switched to French; if not for simultaneous translation, indeed, the ensuing argument between two highly educated Tunisians would have been entirely lost on me. A stage and film actor as well as a director and producer, Belkadhi is typical of Tunisian artists in that he does more than one thing at once and boasts no commercial or pop ambitions. Ironically, though the Tunisian film industry grew largely in response to the tendency of Hollywood producers to shoot their films in various parts of the country, Tunisian cinema is wholly "festival-oriented," in the words of actor and producer Raouf Ben Omar, with no market to speak of. According to Belkadhi, this is both positive and negative: it allows artists to work free of commercial pressure; at the same time, he insisted, it isolates them, limiting the scope of their interests. One consequence, he seemed to imply on several occasions, is that nothing major is taking place in the arts. "The market for Tunisian film is very small, you understand. We do have a private sector, but not in the way that you do in Egypt. Everything is on a much smaller scale, and there is no commercial component whatsoever. That is why what we have here is cinema d'auteur, nothing else." It was at this point that the Habib Bourguiba dictatorship came up. While it is written into dictatorship to give way to a society where art is hardly appreciated, Belkadhi argued, thus limiting, if not completely destroying creative initiative, Bourguiba, unlike many Arab postcolonial dictators, was keen on European-oriented education and women's liberation, with the consequence that there remains, in Tunisia, a tradition of secularism and space for creativity; this, however, remains isolated, divorced not only from the powers that be but from society at large. And the result is an active but narrowly circumscribed community of artists, with few opportunities to spread out. "There are hundreds of production companies. Some rely on equipment. Others have an extensive address book, which enables them to network; and again this will be what they rely on to survive. Ours is a very small company, with only three people involved. We work on a project-by-project basis; every year is different in terms of the quantity and quality of the work we do. Advertisements are what we rely on financially. Of course, the point is to be doing other things -- documentaries, features... But it's advertisements that bring in the greatest funds." One could argue that divorce from a target audience also makes Tunisian film by and large irrelevant to current social-political issues. Yet Belkadhi's own work will often tackle just such issues head-on -- to the shock and dismay of certain segments of Tunisian society, it may be added. One TV series, Dima labès (Always well), produced by the private television channel Canal 21 and centring on an "average" contemporary family, was variously received as an honest and daring depiction of present-day life in Tunis and a slap on the face to convention, morality and even, according to some critics, the country's image abroad. Dima labès brought Belkadhi a dubious fame. Mostly, however, the filmmaker has produced documentaries and short feature films. The latest, Tasawir (Snapshots), a 12-minute feature film that was included in the official selection of the Sao Paolo International Short Film Festival last year, is a beautifully shot, largely silent account of a girl attempting to rid herself of attachment to a failed relationship -- by throwing away a box of snapshots. In the course of this painfully difficult process, she is seen responding to a phonecall from another man -- a man apparently keen on her affection. Cut to the girl and this man's married life: while he is phoning her from work, she is looking through the wardrobe, where -- lo and behold -- she discovers a box of snapshots very similar to her own, a relic of her husband's own premarital love life. Such ironies inform much of Belkadhi's work, which benefits not only from remarkable talent but a rare freedom of approach (Belkadhi never studied cinema or anything remotely related to the arts, and his take on humanity is, for lack of a better expression, more sympathetic than most people's), as well as close attention to the workings of human relations. In this sense, and even though his work is extremely varied, he could be said to favour the social over the psychological. Certainly the open, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the office, and the passion with which Belkadhi rails against dictatorship and the stagnation it tends to generate not only in the arts but in society at large, will readily testify to his being on the left of the status quo, which he does not dismiss so much as persistently and profoundly questioning -- an indication that, though a typical Tunisian, he nonetheless maintains his distance. Many of the topics at stake in the conversation would come up again in the context of Kahloucha, the long documentary Belkadhi had just completed editing while we were there -- and without a doubt the highlight of the evening, perhaps of my experience of art throughout a ten-day stay. He virtually interrupted the process of adding subtitles to let us watch, on the computer screen. A kind of biopic of Moncef Kahloucha, a wall painter- turned local video star from the working-class neighbourhood of Kazmet, in the vicinity of Sousse, perhaps Tunisia's most popular tourist destination, the film touches on a wide range of issues from alcoholism to illegal immigration, from the contrast between Sousse and Kazmet (tourism versus destitution and criminality) to grassroots attitudes and conventions (patriarchy, conservatism and sense of community). To heighten that contrast, indeed -- tourism is the country's principal source of income -- it includes a scene in which tourists stand against a backdrop of five-star luxury, declaring, in their own languages and then in Arabic, "I love Sousse." The name is a sobriquet derived from akhal, the Tunisian Arabic term for "black," and in this sense a kind of Maghrebi equivalent to Samara, derived from asmar, the synonym preferred in the Mashriq. A simple man with complex cinematic ambitions, Kahloucha meets the local cameraman, a professional who films weddings and circumcision celebrations and has his own video editor; he persuades him of his artistic ambitions, and together they start the equivalent of a small-scale production company. Kahloucha employs the locals, most of whom he pays in alcohol; they form the cast and crew of an endless series of phenomenally popular B-movie-type videos screened locally (in one scene the women complain that, since most screenings take place in traditional cafes, they are deprived of the chance to enjoy the films); unlike Tunisian cinema, these films are successful commercial ventures. Belkadhi even travels along with one of them to Italy, where he joins the Kazmet community of mostly illegal immigrants at a screening there. The documentary accompanies Kahloucha on and off the sets, "quoting" extensively from his work and exploring the life and relations of his (often criminal) community -- his family, friends and the people who act with him. Asked about the premiere of Kahloucha, Belkadhi insisted that he had no idea when or where it would be released. Considering the rare beauty of the film, it seemed somewhat strange that he should not be more concerned about this. Yet, in a sense, such calmness also betrayed confidence: though certain of his accomplishment, Belkadhi -- in common with Tunisian art, with Tunis -- also realises the circumstantial limitations surrounding it; and he can only, quietly, patiently await its release.
