Of bodies and politics: towards a body of work in the documentaries of Raja Amari

ABSTRACT

Raja Amari is best known for her fiction features Red Satin (2002), Buried Secrets (2009) and Foreign Body (2016), in which she dissects the mythologisation of mother and daughter relationships by underlining difficult communication and co-dependence. Her less well-known documentaries Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020) likewise explore the bonds between women of different generations and across geographical, religious and political borders. In this article, I investigate Amari’s transnational documentary strategies that foreground the multitude of women’s voices, storytelling strategies, performative identity formation, and female agency. These two documentaries focus on the body of work of extra-ordinary women, who force us into an analytical engagement with diverse voices and politics. The documentaries offer insight into the gendered, racial and generational boundaries that are constantly crossed by two young women who lived more than a century apart. This leads to the article’s central argument that transnational documentary studies offer an opportunity to realign transnational screen studies with its subject, the transnational human experience.

Keywords:

• Documentary
• Tunisia
• Algeria
• Raja Amari
• Gender
• Politics

Introduction

Isabelle Eberhardt and Ghofrane Binous are extra-ordinary women in the histories of Algeria and Tunisia, respectively. They are also the subjects of the two documentaries by Raja Amari, Sur les traces de l’oubli/Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020). The history of the Maghreb is filled with remarkable women that do not feature in official history writing, as many filmmakers have shown. In particular, Assia Djebar’s and Selma Baccar’s work is exemplary of the kind of filmmaking that focuses on foregrounding these historical and contemporary female figures, and as such their films manage to undermine the patriarchal nature of historiography. Indeed, throughout recent (film) history, encompassing both digital and political revolutions, Maghrebi women filmmakers have reinvigorated the challenge to continue to bring attention to the significance of women’s contributions to history, in effect writing herstory to foil the single-story preferred and perpetuated by traditional patriarchy. In bringing attention to the role women have played in the Maghreb’s past and present, these (feminist) filmmakers show how their resistance to the status quo continues to inform not only a better understanding of the complexity of Maghrebi gender and sexuality politics, but also a correction to the homogenizing orientalist-racist gaze upon Maghrebi-Arab women.

I argue that transnational documentary studies offer an opportunity to realign transnational screen studies with its subject, the transnational human experience. Contemporary transnational screen studies have, in my view, veered away from the human stories to focus on the industrial journeys of films as goods on global distribution networks. While those studies are crucial to our expanding understanding of film as a product, it is my contention that screen studies must not lose sight of the humanity of the stories being told in those films that make them worth seeing for audiences. Understanding the transnational industry of production, distribution and exhibition platforms for films as objects must incorporate an awareness of the subjects of these films, and the transnational human experience. As such, this chapter looks at the intersectional subjectivities of the figures central to Amari’s documentaries, moving towards a deeper understanding of Eberhardt and Binous’ personal and political journeys and their significance to an inclusive and transnational Maghrebi society, while also placing Amari’s non-fiction work in the larger framework of her successful transnational oeuvre and the fast-paced developments of Tunisian film culture on a global scale.

Raja Amari’s transnational non-fiction films

Raja Amari is best known for her very successful feature fiction films Satin Rouge/Red Satin (2004), Anonymes/Buried Secrets (2009) and Corps Etranger/Foreign Bodies (2016), which all performed exceptionally well at international film festivals. These three films were (co-)produced by the Tunisian company Nomadis Images and made transnational stars out of Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass and French-Tunisian Hafsia Herzi. Tunisian films have often done well on international distribution and film festival networks. Historically, Tunisian cinema has shown its exceptionalism, especially during the so-called Golden Age of the 1990s with Moufida Tlatli, Ferid Boughédir and Nouri Bouzid’s woman-centred narrative work being critically acclaimed globally. In more recent times, filmmakers Leyla Bouzid and Kaouter Ben Hania have put Tunisian women’s cinema even more firmly on the radar of international film festivals and film critics. Telling locally rooted but universally understood stories of love, self-expression and emancipation, films like As I Open My Eyes (Bouzid 2015) and Beauty and the Dogs (Hania and Kaouther 2017) have given expression to the feminist force of these young Tunisian filmmakers. The transnational nature of these films is also evident from their filmmakers’ own bi-cultural identities, split as they are living and working between France and Tunisia, and the producers’ collaborative work across the Mediterranean.

In Red Satin, Buried Secrets and Foreign Bodies, Amari dissects the universal mythologisation of mother and daughter bonds and the stunted communication of co-dependent relationships. She also points her camera firmly at the women’s bodies, and the ways in which a woman’s body can become a tool in her self-actualisation and liberation. Their physical sensuality is a means to express freedom and independence in the face of a conservative society that continues to marginalise women. Indeed, the sexuality of the female protagonists operates in a long history of sexual cinematic confidence (see for example The Trace [Mabrouk and Néjia 1988], Halfaouine [Ferid Boughédir 1990] and Silences of the Palace [Tlatli 1994]). However, in these historical films, the emancipation of women’s bodies remains framed in an inert state of being, with countless limitations impacting their bodies in terms of how they act within (patriarchal) spaces, and how they move or don’t move towards self-expression. This results in an indirect, passive vision of women’s Tunisian emancipation. Amari’s fictional women however enact their femininity through movement and consistently represent direct engagement with gender politics and the role of women in society but are, as a consequence, only active on the edges of society. As such, she stands out from the cinematic indirectness of womanhood and the female body, which is characteristic of Tunisian cinema before the Revolution, dependent as it was on state-sanctioned permissions. As such, cinematic women often were merely a symbolic body-politic of the nation’s independence rather than representatives of an emancipated population. Amari criticises this with Tunisian Spring, a TV-film she made in 2014. This is the only film in which she focuses entirely on the male experience. She shows how the nation is betrayed by its leaders as the optimism of youth and of the revolution’s promises are replaced with political disillusionment and the disappointment and loss of hope for three young men. Made in the post-Revolutionary era – the harsh reality of an incomplete uprising being hijacked by religious extremists (Salafists) – the film does not shy away from portraying emasculated men struggling to come to terms with their individual and shared despair.

While women’s sexuality and sensuality are at the core of all Amari’s fictional work, there is very little direct engagement with race and ethnicity, or with politics and religion. In many ways, this is also typical for pre-revolutionary Tunisia cinema under a succession of dictatorships. Scholars have explained at length how Tunisian cinema can be seen as a product of both an explicit and an internalised censorship practice. Boughédir’s famous line is that in Tunisia there is a ruling ‘tendency to synthesize influences, […] transforming them in a nice, happy, moderated way. It’s a culture that smooths off the sharp edges’ (Barlet 1998). Khélil adds that ‘Tunisia is a land of fictions and myths’ (Khélil 2007, 80). As Rouxel explores, post-revolutionary cinema from Tunisia has more assuredly enabled (female) filmmakers to express their politics and their allegiances with or criticisms of government. Political cinema has always been about the relationship between the individual and the collective (Rouxel 2022, 289), and in Tunisia this is particularly about ‘tunisianité’, which expresses a ‘belonging to a national entity’ (Rouxel 2022, 289). While it is true that ‘the medium of women’s documentary filmmaking in Tunisia has been provocative for decades’ (Rouxel 2022, 301), the way in which filmmakers have been able to denounce inequalities in society has been subject to what Wedeen (2013) describes as ‘safety valves’, meaning that criticism of the government and policies is filtered through metaphors and irony, in order to bypass any obstacles in the production and release of the film. And so, while the ‘political’ and ‘provocative’ nature of documentaries in Tunisia is rooted in women’s work since the 1970s, there is a sharp contrast between pre- and post-revolution cinema in that politics now take centre stage on the screen, moving away from the ‘tunisianité’ and the body-politic, towards a personal and subjective experience of the ups and downs of political and social activism. Amari herself has not completely avoided political content in her work, but was nevertheless always relatively careful to balance her own bicultural reality as a France-based Tunisian with the particularities of individual women’s lives on the fictional screen. In an interview in 2021, Amari openly admitted that she has preferred to look at Tunisian politics through the indirect lens of personal, subjective women’s stories. With the documentaries, she explains that ‘I had wanted to talk about politics indirectly, but now I had to tackle it head on’ (Aftab 2021, emphasis mine).

Indeed, like her fictional work, Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020) explore the bonds between women of different generations and across diverse borders. But while the fictional work has a subjective and introspective power, in the documentaries this subjectivity is compellingly framed in the wider context of Maghrebi politics of gender and race. The documentaries do not focus on ordinary women’s bodies, but on the body of work of two extra-ordinary women, who force us into an analytical engagement with diverse voices and politics, as seen from the non-normative perspectives of a gender-fluid Swiss Russian traversing the Maghreb, Isabelle Eberhardt, and a young Black woman from the south of Tunisia running for election in Tunis, Ghofrane Binous. While in her fictional work the close-up and extreme close-up on sensuous bodies in movement dominate the screen, in the documentaries Amari prefers to use mid-to-long shots. As such, she allows a much broader context for the viewer in which to place the lives and work of the women-subjects. As such, instead of focusing on the physical bodies of the women on screen, here we gain insight into their life stories, which provides a sense of rootedness in their lived experiences. In the portrayal of these young women on the margins of society, and across very different times and circumstances, Amari provides a mosaic of voices. The multiple facets of their personalities translate into multi-stranded stories. While one woman’s voice comes through in fragments from letters, poetry and posthumously published books read out in voice-over, the other woman speaks directly to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, testifying to her choices of career, activism and politics. For one woman this multi-directionality may be a prerogative because she hails from a privileged bourgeois Swiss family, for the other it is a sheer necessity in a world where things change constantly and are defined only to become uprooted again. Their search for an identity causes the existential question of whether it is the world they want to change or rather themselves. Amari’s choice of subjects and voices for her documentaries, then, addresses a world in turmoil and women taking the lead. This fits in with Martin’s conceptualisation of Maghrebi women’s filmmaking, which she defines as inherently rooted in and resistant to the oppressions experienced by them. As bicultural women, they constantly ‘negotiate transcultural, often paradoxical identities’ and ‘portray women’s winding itineraries across various cultures set against a complex and ever-changing Mediterranean landscape’ (Martin 2010, 23). As such, these documentaries are perhaps more obviously transnational in content and subject matter than Amari’s fictional work, even if they are not as successful on transnational distribution networks.

In what follows I investigate Amari’s documentary strategies that foreground the power of hindsight on the impact of images and performative gender identities, the layering of women’s voices and storytelling strategies, and the way in which women’s communities strive for hope despite a general disillusionment. These two documentaries offer insight into the gendered, racial and generational boundaries that are constantly crossed by two extraordinary young women who lived more than a century apart. The concept of transnationalism taken on board in this chapter, then, is rooted in a duality very rarely admitted in transnational film analyses: optimism for the future despite a harsh everyday reality, an aspiring solidarity faced with debilitating loneliness, and the eternal problem of an unachievable home. Transnational screen studies has, for me, become too focused on industrial networks of production, distribution and exhibition, in the process losing touch with the intricacies of emotionally charged and individually experienced journeys by the subjects of the films (see for example the work of Patricia Caillé (2020, 2022) and Kay Dickinson (2016, 2023)). Though I value that work deconstructing the industrial networks of film, I see the need for incorporation of the human transnational experience. Therefore, I propose that non-fiction work can return a sensitivity to the experience of being transnational, where it is not the materiality of the film and its movement along industrial networks, but the journey of the subject in and of the film (whether this is symbolic or concrete or both) that clarifies how the aspirational nature of transnational identities and the longing for intersubjective relationships is often an excruciatingly lonely personal position. Doing so enables us to ‘decolonise’ and de-canonise the type of thinking the idealism of transnationalism engenders. The focus on non-fiction films that have not entered the mainstream of international film festival networks and markets, liberates us from assumptions about the centrality of production and distribution, and instead enables us to focus on the story and the storyteller, on the relationship between subject, director and audience, and on the affective experiences of an arduous intersectional transnationalism.

The films: Seekers of Oblivion (2004) and She Had a Dream (2020)

Seekers of Oblivion (2004) presents an account of the life of Russian-Swiss explorer and author Isabelle Eberhardt at the turn of the 20^th century, told in voice-over through her letters and philosophical travelogues, and through interviews with scholars of her autobiographical writing. Eberhardt was born in Geneva in 1877, and left Europe for North Africa at a young age. While living in Algeria and travelling through North Africa, she gained an almost mythical reputation as an icon of freedom. In order to live the life of freedom she craved, she lived like a man, travelling along the margins of society as an artist and author dedicated to Sufism. Her alter ego was a student by the name of Mahmoud Saadi, who was exiled from Algeria to Tunisia but returns as a journalist and alleged spy working in the service of Hubert Lyautey, a soldier and friend at the time. Her lover’s name was Slimane. Living like a man was a tactic that enabled her to gain access to social sectors that were off limits to women, but her gender-bending relationship with Slimane also caused controversy. Eberhardt passed away in a flash flood in 1904, and very little remains of her life by way of documented archive or ephemera. The myth that surrounded her however continues through her writings, and in a (very limited) community of admirers in Algeria. The film was produced by Misr Studio, the Egyptian company run by Marianne Khoury, the niece of Yousef Chahine, who also produced his films. This is relevant in the sense that the production company had at that time already had experience with artistic non-fiction films by Chahine centralising non-heteronormative identities. Nomadis Images was line producer, so the Tunisian company retained an interest in Amari’s films but was unable to act as the main producer.

She Had a Dream (2020) was co-produced by Cinétévé and Arte France, again with Nomadis Images as line producer, and had its world premiere at IDFA, later also at CPH:DOX and the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage (the Carthage Cinema Days or JCC). In She Had a Dream, Amari follows Ghofrane Binous, an ex-flight attendant whose widely publicised racist attack by a passenger directly impacted ‘Law 50’, the 2018 law criminalising racism in Tunisia. Binous decides to cancel her wedding and run for election instead. The young Black Tunisian woman uses and is used in turn by politicians in a post-2011 Tunisia that hesitantly moves towards and away again from democracy.¹ As such, the documentary directly engages with two rarely endeavoured topics, namely gender and race, and places them in a wider political context in Tunisia. As a Black woman from a working-class neighbourhood in Tunisia, 25-year-old Binous has spent her whole life dealing with class inequality, racism, and sex discrimination. After becoming an activist member of M'nemty, a female-led anti-racism group, she decides that she wants to run for election. The film follows this charismatic figure in the run-up to the 2019 national elections, during the turbulent campaign period, on the way to countless meetings, and in heated conversations with family members, friends, and party members. The film is multi-layered, and the connection between maker and subject shapes the conversations on intersectionality, the personal and the political. Binous embodies the Tunisian feminist and anti-racist struggle, giving voice to and, importantly, demanding that people listen to her own and a shared set of dreams and emotions. Amari has testified how she was immediately attracted to Binous’ charisma and wanted to be close to this outgoing, open and confident young woman who embodied the hope of the revolution.

This can be seen as part of a trend in contemporary Tunisian cinema, in politically-marked films and non-fiction in particular. As Rouxel (2022, 297) summarises, women’s documentaries in Tunisia changed drastically in 2011. Freedom of expression (temporarily) arrived with an unseen urgency and resulted in a wider range of political agency in women’s representation. It is not that political dissidence had not been there before in women’s non-fiction work, but it had always been subtler, and the composure and confidence with which young filmmakers burst onto the scene after 2011 with outspoken political work was unprecedented.² So, the development between Amari’s two non-fiction films discussed here shows clearly how the first, Seekers of Oblivion, from 2004, fits in with an outward look and a subtler, more hidden political agency in films and their filmmakers, while She Had a Dream, from 2021, is much more inward-looking at a specifically Tunisian issue, while it is also confidently outspoken through its subject.

Hindsight narrates past controversies

Both Seekers of Oblivion and She Had a Dream deal with a past. Seekers was made 100 years after the death of Isabelle Eberhardt, and Dream was made 10 years after the Tunisian Revolution. This hindsight is central to the films’ format and structure. Seekers is a reflective piece that talks about Eberhardt in a multitude of voices, including her own, read out from diary fragments and literary writings. The inclusion of the subject’s voice is of crucial importance, as it gives shape to her character, understanding and her quest for ‘oblivion’. Eberhardt was a traveller who considered North Africa, and specifically Algeria, an escape from the stranglehold of the polite society she was born into. Passing as a man and enjoying the privileges of that gender enabled her to experience the ‘orientalist’ life to the full. Her musings on Algerian life and culture are initially escapist, in particular in her meditations on the desert and its peoples. Perhaps comparable to the way in which the Beat poets later experienced North Africa, she manifested a life for herself on the periphery of society, as far removed from reality as possible. In a sense, the periphery, as bell hooks has shown, is the ideal space from which to gaze upon the ‘centre’ and start to gain insight in and understanding of political agency (Hooks 1984). As such, her escapism can only be sustained until she starts to understand the reality of the people she observes through her study of and constant written reflection on local life and spirituality. At that point, Eberhardt finds a stronger socio-political connection to the people she travels and lives with. As such, the film offers not only a personal study of a gender-fluid and politically controversial traveller, but also a broader understanding of a culture that is removed from her own society. Presenting the documentary from the perspective of a Tunisian-Algerian filmmaker who has experienced significant success by this point, Amari exposes the multitude of gazes: the French scholars she interviews gaze upon Isabelle and upon the Maghreb, Eberhardt gazes upon the Algerian people she travels amongst, the Algerian peoples gaze upon Eberhardt’s eccentricities, and Eberhardt also gazes upon her own unique multi-directional perspective. Isabelle’s outsider gaze upon the Algerian people she cares about eventually enables her to turn a critical look upon herself as a privileged white traveller in the desert, and as such she manages to change herself into someone who exercises solidarity with her adopted people. 100 years after her death, after colonisation, decolonisation, migration and a fundamental lack of post-colonial understanding, Eberhardt’s story in fact represents a reciprocal bridge between the centre and the periphery of the French colonial and post-colonial experience, and of self and other, between orientalism or oblivion and acute intersubjective awareness of ‘the Other’. In that way, she is ahead of her time, in that she understands the benefits of dialogue between cultures at a time when the French authorities did not even consider this as an option. She was close enough to ‘the Other’ to start to understand and interact with them, something that enhances the story of colonisation and decolonisation and, in particular, restitution. She was both an artist and a performer, using her body as the Western woman Isabelle Eberhardt and her embodiment of an Arab man, Mahmoud Saadi. Through her body of work as a performer, an understanding of the intersubjectivity of Europeans and Algerians comes into existence, something that remained virtually impossible until Algerian independence in 1962, almost 60 years after her death.

In She Had a Dream the hindsight is only 10 years, but it is equally powerful. Through the charismatic figure of Ghofrane Bonous, a beautiful young Black Tunisian woman whose experiences of racism and social deprivation have made her determined to fight for change, Amari shows a growing concern with women in Tunisia, their hopes and dreams and the level of disappointment 10 years after the revolution. The relative success of the film on the international film festival network is evidence also of the global interest in the temporary success and the disappointment of the Tunisian Revolution, as well as the intersection of the highly relevant themes of race and gender. In contrast with Seekers of Oblivion, which is available on Youtube, in 2022 She Had a Dream continues to travel along international distribution channels in large part due to its honest treatment of a journey that develops from intense hope to painful disillusionment. The inward-looking Binous is a charismatic body through which to find a way into the chaos of the aftermath of the revolution and the impact it has had on the slow and painful changes to the Tunisian government. As such, she becomes a tool that enables others to look more critically inward towards the potential of change and the effort that requires. And yet, Amari does her best to retain a sense of hope for the future of young Tunisians in general and Binous in particular: this resilient young woman revives her dreams of making changes to Tunisian society through a renewed commitment to her feminist and anti-racist activism with M'nemty (about which more later). There is a sense that while changing the world out there takes longer and is harder than Binous anticipated, she can change herself and continue to fight for a minor role in the future of her country, representing her people. Amari has explained that Binous is now a law student, developing her career through education and a degree that will facilitate her path to a political career (Green 2021). The idea of these two young women setting out to change the world, but then returning to the more manageable goal of changing themselves, rings true across time and space, and the hindsight of the films emphasises this.

Spaces for new voices

The hindsight in both films offers space for reflection for Eberhardt, Binous, Amari and the viewer. Considering them as transnational women with historically diverse but equally impactful political and personal experiences allows us to engage with them as people with lived experiences rather than as products to consume on transnational distribution networks. Time and space also give shape to the aesthetic of the films. In Seekers, Isabelle is conspicuous by her absence, as she passed away a century before the making of the film. However, there are some photographs of her either as a travelling European woman or dressed as an Arab man. These images are used in the film but are complemented with talking-head style interviews with her French biographers and Algerian specialists, and street interviews with people encountered on location as the film travels in its subject’s footsteps. The documentary takes on an experimental aesthetic, dominated by a very mobile handheld camera, which represents the travelling woman walking and riding in the desert, flaneuring along the seafront and journeying by ship across the Mediterranean. At the very beginning of the film, before the credits, the voice-over states:

I am alone, faced with the wide expanse of the grey murmuring sea. I am alone, as I’ve always been everywhere. As I will always be throughout the entrancing and deceiving universe. Alone, with behind me an entire world of vanished hopes, of fading illusions, of memories retreating more every day, to the point of becoming almost unreal.

These are Isabelle’s words, read out by Moroccan actress Sana Alaoui. The introspective nature of most of the writing invites a soft, clear voice laid over moving images of landscapes, seascapes and horizons, often represented in slow motion. After the above statement, ocean waves fade and transform into sand dunes, and the voice-over pauses. The connection between ocean and desert is made explicit at several points in the film, connecting their sense of space, freedom and vastness with Isabelle’s philosophical musings. She repeats the word ‘alone’ a lot: ‘I am alone, and I dream. Forever alone in the haughty and bleakly sweet solitude of my soul. I will follow my path through life until the bell of eternal sleep tolls from the grave’. These thoughts on the space offered by the desert landscapes provide a poetic-philosophical introspection on being a misfit and a wanderer. Indeed, Eberhardt calls herself the daughter of an unstable couple from Russia that settled in Switzerland as bourgeois refugees, an identity she escaped by reinstalling herself in the Maghreb. The way in which she immersed herself in her adopted country’s culture – specifically in Sufism – speaks of her transnational identity, and her writings testify to profound loneliness in that state of being. The loneliness reveals a thanatic drive as the eternal traveller, disillusioned with life and polite society, but equally unfulfilled by the space of a foreign land. The repetition of the word ‘seule’, or ‘alone’ signifies a lack of roots, without a sense of possible return, without a longing for home, because there is no home. This intensely human experience is without hope and unique to the transnational body (and mind).

Introspection also signifies the journeys Amari must take in order to tie together various strands of the unstable story Isabelle Eberhardt has invented for herself. Scholars, writers and distant friends confirm that her roots are uncertain, in particular her paternity. Her mother died at a very young age, so as an adult orphan she wanders the Maghreb, considering the loneliness of life and rejecting any systematic clarity imposed on her life by outsiders. Everyone interviewed confirms that she invented her origins, or played up to fantastical assumptions such as, for example, that Rimbaud was her father, which is a theory developed due to the similarity between her and the French poet’s work. Another story that circulates claims that her father was her mother’s doctor and that he raped her, which resulted in Isabelle’s life. However, as is pointed out in the film, this revelation, in a letter to a friend, comes immediately before a request for a favour, so it is speculated that this might be manipulation of the friendship in order to evoke compassion and inspire the donation. The product of a violent connection and without roots or tangible past, Isabelle reinvents herself in a wide-open space, for her own benefit and for the story she wants to tell, the story she wants to be. Interviewees agree that the enigma is what makes her so fascinating. And it is something that doubtlessly contributed to her reputation as an alleged spy. She is also said to have dressed as a sailor and a worker, and photographs of Isabelle Eberhardt dressed as different types of men (sheikhs, sailors, merchants) are shown next to the many letters used as source materials. The unstable understanding of her life and journeys is rooted in her letters and her poetic travelogue, used as a partial and subjective archive that is untrustworthy yet fascinating. Letters, diaries and posthumously published books are the primary source materials but because they all originate from Isabelle herself, she appears as a carefully curated identity of many strands that puzzles and intrigues, speaks to the imagination, and mythologises her.

She adores the landscapes of the desert, with dunes and sunsets, which she describes as melancholic and sad, and they make her writings introspective. Later on, as she got to know and understand the people, the writing becomes more outward looking, interested as she is in the Arab people, the civilians, who see her as ‘a Sufi writer from El Oued’. In interviews on the streets of El Oued, people explain that she was misunderstood in her time by the colonisers, and is misunderstood now by the religious powers in Algeria, who, they say, have destroyed everything that remains associated with her life and writings, so that it does not attract attention. Living as Mahmoud Saadi, a man, with Slimane, a male Arab lover, the couple attracted outrage, as mixed relationships were not allowed at the time (let alone a seemingly queer relationship), and they had to hide. And so, other people interviewed in the street deny knowing anything about her, but they do recall a ‘foreigner’ by the name of Isabelle Eberhardt who died in the flood and is buried in the Bou Jemaa cemetery. The long silence that follows makes space for emphasis on the individual male bystanders looking straight into the camera with meaningful looks on their faces. The filmmaker here implies that they know more than they let on and that the life of Isabelle remains a taboo.

In She Had a Dream, Ghofrane Binous spends a lot of time on the terrace of her house in Tunis, looking out over the city and sea, and down to the street where the people of her community walk past and wave at her. In these moments she shows her vulnerability, her introspection and her reflection on the significance of what she wants and how she is going to achieve it. Ghofrane lives in a so-called blue-collar neighbourhood in Tunis, where the camera stays close to her, is guided by her, and is involved in the conversations she has with people in public. Binous seems keen to perpetuate the (local) myth of her power, her image as a beautiful, strong and independent young woman who knows what she wants and has enough ambition to go after it despite the many obstacles. She never backs down in conversation and portrays her strength through confidence in her posture and voice. This self-mythologisation is a tool in her battle with those powers that continue to make life difficult for her people. She feels a responsibility to speak out and find a space where she is heard. To her mind she needs to enter politics, as a representative of the people she lives with. She aims to change her society, but the backdrop to her political ambition is a divided post-Revolutionary society where people have very little confidence in Tunisian democracy.

The importance of finding a space where her voice can be heard cannot be understated. She started her career as a flight attendant, and spoke out on social media against the racism she encountered on flights. Social media as a platform is crucial to young women like her, as it offers a brave space, where she can speak her mind and find like-minded people that support her. Speaking out against sexism and racism is not only brave, but also controversial and in Ghofrane Binous’ case it developed and strengthened her principled ethos, something she needs to sustain passion for her activism and political ambitions. But while this extroverted side to her personality is celebrated, we also see how she is exhausted by it. The film is kind to her as it allows her to return to the introspective moments where sound and voices are drowned out. For example, Binous is seen in the beauty salon but is not heard talking to her friends. Next to the brave space she enacts in public and on social media, this salon provides a private safe space, where talking and female bonding give her the inner strength needed to continue with her political ambitions.

Binous’ home is in the south of Tunisia, a place she loves and returns to often, but also a place where she does not see a future for herself. As such, she has a transnational existence in Tunis, as a Black woman in a country and culture that do not want to acknowledge the presence of people like her. Amari puts the young woman entirely centre stage and indeed in charge of what is said, when and where. Binous is smart, self-reflexive and perceptive. She interacts with the camera in a natural way, not only speaking and using her voice to lead the thinking and dialogue between herself and ‘her people’, but also in direct communication with the filmmaker/camera and the audience of the film: she breaks the fourth wall on several occasions, using facial expressions to indicate her thoughts and ideas about situations occurring on camera. This interaction enhances Binous’ charisma and implicates the filmmaker as well as a (hidden) transnational audience. Being Binous’ interlocutor, the audience gains insight into the reality behind the performance on camera. The obvious and the hidden messages converge on Amari’s lens and involve the audience in a nuanced story that does not hide any side of Tunisian political and personal experience.

Binous talks about her experience as a flight attendant, as an activist with the anti-racist women’s association she works for and as someone running for election, but she also reflects on how these aspects of her career have impacted her family life and her friendships. She is a storyteller: she has a clear goal in mind, and because she is given free rein to decide where the camera roves and what is said by whom, as viewers we trace the journey she has gone through. Through her personal, subjective story, we can discover the outcome of the journey about the place of women in the political process, Black people in Tunisia and class struggles in North Africa. Binous understands that this is a huge responsibility that she gives herself, but she believes in herself: she says, ‘I have to be stronger and bolder’. This confidence is attractive, it brings hope to others, because despite serious setbacks in the process of running for election, she does not give up. She challenges the status quo and asks very difficult and pertinent questions both of her fellow politicians and the people in her neighbourhood. She sets an example for others to take their destiny in their own hands. She understands that to successfully achieve what she wants, that is to say, change her society to become more inclusive of women, Black people and the poor, she needs to start with herself, locally. This lesson is a humbling one, but one that is infectious. She says: ‘Women believe they have a real place in this process, even though we see they are pushed out of the process’. She is still struggling to be at the centre of the change that is needed, despite all the difficulties.

The personal is always also political

As individuals, both Eberhardt and Binous are portrayed as complexly human, as vulnerable and strong, as women that learned difficult lessons about self-actualisation. Most importantly, they learn that, in order to change the world, they had to change themselves. In Seekers of Oblivion, it is not until we hear from Abdel Rahmane Boutaieb, who is part of the Isabelle Eberhardt Fellowship, that the film starts to engage in real depth with Eberhardt’s legacy, specifically her philosophical stance. He explains that ‘she came to the desert to look for her happiness, her way of life, her philosophy’. The wanderer in the desert has space and time to think about the meaning of life and the best way to live life as an individual in a society that is not her own. This is when we gain insight into the more exciting aspects of Isabelle’s life in urban Algiers. In voice-over, she describes where she lived (‘behind a door and up the stairs, through alleyways and up to the terrace’) and how many of her friends were people that lived on the outskirts of society: petty thieves, prostitutes, hardened criminals, who also spoke about philosophy and spirituality. She observed the lives of her friends and described fun events, but chose Islam and entered the Qadriyan brotherhood, to find the ‘pureness of the old Islam’ as she described it, even though she was a woman living as a man, something not allowed by Islam. She was especially interested in Sufism, a spiritual aspect of Islam that emphasises universal peace as a concrete alternative to fundamentalism. She explains in that no one knows the purity of her soul in the desert, which coexists with her physical debauched life among prostitutes and criminals. She describes herself as a ‘he’ and points out that even her friends do not know her true self underneath the mask of the exuberant young man. And yet she constantly returns to trying to explain herself:

I am nothing but an eccentric, a dreamer, who wants to live far from the world, to live a free nomad’s life in order to then try and share what she has seen and maybe convey to others the melancholic and charmed shudder she feels in front of the sad splendours of the Sahara. That’s all.

The latter part of the film shows how Eberhardt ended up in exile in Tunisia disguised as Mahmoud Saadi, who returns to Algeria clandestinely and stays in a ‘relay’ in El Oued in the Behima desert, a place for travellers to rest and eat. The filmmaker’s guide, someone from the Fellowship, shows where she was assaulted and suffered stab wounds, which made her ill for the rest of her (short) life. This reveals in more depth the love affair with Slimane, a very passionate physical relationship that encountered much interference from the colonial government. The local communities seem to have understood Mahmoud Saadi’s identity better than the authorities did, and interviewees confirm that they accepted her as she was, in her gender-fluidity and her sexuality. Most of the respect she earned comes from her experience of and writings about Sufism, her understanding of Islam and her life in the pursuit of beauty and introspection.

An important community in Sufism is the Zawiya. A Zawiya is a Sufi institution led or established by a sheikh, that serves both as a centre for learning and as a sanctuary for pilgrims. Benaïssa (1997, 47) explains that Sufism was central to the sustainability of Islam during colonial times, and in fact offered the roots of a resistance movement to the colonial occupation. Rizwan and Saleem acknowledge that The existence of Sufi orders in modern Algerian history was not negative at all, but rather, it led Algerian society to confront the French occupation. The Sufi movement has a prominent role in the popular revolutions that took place in Algeria during the nineteenth century (Rizwan and Saleem 2020). Sufism is also an experience of Islam expressed through introspection and meditation. Isabelle/Mahmoud spent the last few years of her life in the Zawiya de Kenedsa, led by Sidi Brahim. Guides take Amari around the Zawiya and explain that she lived ‘behind this wall’, as all that remains is a ruin. The story they tell is that after the Fellowship held a conference here in 1999, the authorities destroyed the building to prevent it from becoming a place of pilgrimage for tourists and literary fans. They thus also destroyed any possibility for the Zawiya to become a space for community to commemorate the writer.

During periods of crisis, rooted as they were in their location and community, Zawiyas often became places of political legitimacy (Fedele 2020, 47–60). As such, they offer a safe space for both male and female followers of Sufism to practice and to find sanctuary. Isabelle was evidently in need, lacking as she always was in financial stability and suffering from poor health and persecution. It was a haven for her to hide from society even further than she already did, in the company of people who accepted her and her romantic relationship simply because she also practiced and understood what she called ‘the purest form of spirituality’. This small community died out, and the film shows how contemporary governments and religious leaders have not only persecuted Sufi sects throughout the country in the service of Islamist unity, but have also made efforts to erase Eberhardt from the annals of Algerian history.

The oblivion Eberhardt sought, is connected to her understanding and experience of Sufism: in Sufism, the road to spiritual knowledge – to certainty – could never be confined to the process of rational or purely intellectual activity, without human knowledge and the direct, immediate experience of the heart. Truth, they believed, can be sought and found only with one’s entire being. They insisted on a total identification with this truth: the believer must pass away into the spiritual being, must not only have but will become divine knowledge. Indeed, in Sufism, the person is called upon to leave their life, to migrate, to go on a journey beyond the limitations of world and self (Bey 2011). Isabelle Eberhardt/Mahmoud Saadi aspired to this knowledge, this state of becoming. Seeing as Eberhardt’s life and writings are so seamlessly aligned with Sufism, it is easy to see that the story Isabelle wrote down about her life took shape as she discovered the Sufi spirituality and started to live by it. In this case her physical body as well as her spiritual body of work became one and the same thing. The performance of life as a Sufi scholar established her myth and destroyed her life in the service of her spirituality.

Though Binous’ community is not the spiritual kind, it is equally rooted in her personal life experiences. In her case, these are entirely defined by gender and ethnicity-related identities. As a young working-class Black woman, she is the kind of woman not often seen on the Tunisian screen. She has suffered racism and sexism first-hand, and mobilises everything she can – her body, herself – to try and change society. Embodying race and gender equality causes her conviction and establishes her as a political candidate. She emphasises that racism comes from the ruling elite. The shared experience of racism, sexism and extreme poverty creates community solidarity. As an extra-ordinary woman, she has managed to go beyond her neighbourhood, which is very rare for a young woman like her, and has taken steps to occupy a more public space in Tunisia, while she continues to return to her people to bring a new dynamic to the neighbourhood.

This dedication to her roots, her neighbourhood and her community, is translated into a commitment to M’nemty, an activist group that fights for equal rights and anti-racism. M’nemty is run by Saadia Mosbah and is one of the very first anti-racist associations in the Arab world.³ In Tunisia, racism is a silent problem, in a country entirely oriented towards Europe and the Middle East, ignoring or rejecting its Africanness: ‘What’s particular about racism in Tunisia is that it is silent … It is an unbearable social hypocrisy’ (Bendami 2021). This problem runs deep, Mosbah testifies in the film. It is entrenched in society’s refusal to acknowledge itself as multi-ethnic and multicultural. M’nemty is an association working for a pluralistic Tunisia that allows individuals to flourish in their diversity, and to fight the different forms of racial discrimination in Tunisia. Based on the principle of non-violence, their activity focuses on education, on raising awareness, and to eradicate all forms of racism: institutional, cultural and social. It is with M’nemty that Binous finds a vibrant community that she can serve, something that inspires her to think more critically and engage on a more active and activist level with the ideas of representation that the government gets wrong. It is her Black body that enables her to find a space in M’nemty and learn to speak out and take action, and it is arguably her Black identity that ultimately leads to her rejection of the political leaders she initially supports. The violence of the racism Binous has experienced and the toxicity of the discrimination she experiences in mainstream politics lead to Binous’ realisation that it is impossible to change society and politics. Instead, she takes the decision to change herself, her own prospects, and perhaps her community. She does so by dedicating herself to the campaigning work she does with M’nemty and starting a Law degree at university. This move towards self-preservation and development comes with maturity and wisdom gained from conversations with Saadia Mosbah and Raja Amari.

To a large extent, She Had a Dream exists because of the community of women filmmakers in Tunisia and the corpus of strong female characters they have been able to give shape to over the decades. Women’s cinema is a healthy and productive field in Tunisia, and Binous is aware of this, and sees her commitment to and involvement with Raja Amari as functioning in a framework of a women’s cinema with potentially huge transnational audience. Raja Amari’s oeuvre was known to Binous before filming started, and in some ways this was an incentive to contribute to the film. Becoming part of the line-up of female actors that have been made famous by Amari’s films was a bonus for an ambitious young woman like her. Performing the role of intersectional woman in the impressive line-up of actresses in Amari’s films, gives Binous a platform of embodied criticism of Tunisian history and society. In interview, Amari testifies how Ghofrane ‘wondered how she would film her’ (Green 2021). Being used to the selfie-culture of social media, Ghofrane was relatively comfortable in front of the camera, but the professional filmmaking crew following her was a different experience and attracted more attention that she usually did. This worked in Ghofrane’s favour, as she was able to speak to increasingly large numbers of people.

The appearance of iconic filmmaker Selma Baccar needs to be read in this context. Selma Baccar was one of the first women to make a feature film in Tunisia, Fatma 75, an essayistic film about the history of Tunisian women’s emancipation. After the Revolution in 2011, Baccar became increasingly interested in politics and – like Binous – wanted to contribute to the changes Tunisia was undergoing, and she was elected to represent her constituency on the Assemblée Constituante. She contributed to devising a new constitution for the country. In the film she is visited by Amari and Binous, and Baccar provides advice about being a woman in politics. She is encouraging but enigmatic and smiles benevolently. The film also refers to Moufida Tlatli, another feminist icon of Tunisian cinema, who became the Minister of Cultural Affairs in 2011, for the transitional government. She was a role model for both Binous and Amari. As such, Amari, Binous and the documentary are all framed in a confident cinematic and feminist context in Tunisia, a field where film and politics are intertwined, and She Had a Dream can have an impact.

As Binous learned a lot in the process of the making of the film, so did Amari learn from Binous about being part of a community. Amari, being bi-cultural French and Tunisian and coming to the Tunis neighbourhood as a relatively privileged, educated and financially secure filmmaker, needed to gain the trust not only of Binous but also of her supporters. She describes how this trust was built very quickly, purely because Binous understood that the crew was here to listen to her, her struggle and experience. As such, she opened up to the team and to the filmmaker very quickly, and a good relationship was built. Binous’ centrality to her neighbourhood was crucial to the success of the film. As Amari had always worked with women, and filmed them in close-ups, camera on their bodies and attentive to their emotions and dynamics, there was a sense that the female solidarity could lead to an effective political film. They spoke a lot about and shared a cause to believe in, and so Binous allowed her to have the same approach as she did to her star actors: Amari followed her closely, and over-the-shoulder shots allow the filmmaker and the audience to see Tunisia through Binous’ eyes. The energy and the hope exuded by Binous is infectious not just for the camera and the filmmaker but also for the neighbourhood and the community she represents. The relative failure of the election therefore resulted in a huge disappointment; not disappointment in Binous but in the politics, in the party she chose to commit to and in the politicians using her as foils for what they see as gaps in their programmes. Her family and the people in her neighbourhood continue to believe in and support her, and are very proud. They want her to go beyond the boundaries that society imposes on her, and it is this love between people and their commitment, their belief in her, that carries her towards her goal of becoming a lawyer and a politician.

Amari felt that, because she had been so focused on making her highly successful fiction films in the past 20 years or so, and the success of these films abroad, she urgently needed to become involved in Tunisia’s ‘real life’ on the screen. Sharing this experience with Binous allowed her to be at the heart of the process, to see the details of community life being played out in front of a very small crew. She admits to having learned a lot about the situation in Tunisia through making this non-fiction film, and as a filmmaker she learned to work differently, with a small team, very mobile, constantly learning to adapt to the changing situations. As she testifies, the making of this documentary taught Amari a different way of filmmaking, one that is more political, more personal and more community-focused, and with smaller but perhaps more politicised transnational audiences too.

Conclusion: hope is a choice

Finally, as both the idealistic women in Amari’s documentaries realise, hope for the future is of central importance to the individual’s quality of life. While they may go through ups and downs, both deal with disillusionment in a way that signifies that ultimately, there is always hope. Ernst Bloch has shown how hope is not an emotion but an attitude, a choice (Bloch [1954] 1986). Eberhardt and Binous both embody this choice. While they are both functioning – one by choice and one by design – on the margins of a society they both want to make better, they also realise that to change society they have to build resilience in the face of disappointment. This is achieved not only through physical adaptations in terms of how they allow their bodies to function in their communities and in their societies, but also in terms of how their body of work – in Eberhardt’s case her books, in Binous’ case her public persona and activism – impacts their immediate surroundings and, most importantly, the people in those surroundings with whom they live, love and move.

Even after the Oued flood, in which Isabelle Eberhardt passed away, her writings live on and people commemorate her commitment to living a life as purely as possible. The camera observes and interrogates life without Eberhardt, but her followers, her readers and her friends keep her spirit alive by publishing her work and continuing the commitment to a life of contemplation and introspection, lived in the service of understanding between cultures. One elderly man lives in the town where she passed away, and keeps a meticulous biography, a record of her life, and a bibliography, of her publications and of others’ publications about her. He literally gives shape to her body of work. He says he lives like her, dedicated to their shared spirituality, to the moment in which he lives. When he explains that one of the streets used to be named after her but was renamed in an attempt to perhaps wash her out of Algerian or local history, his facial expression – especially his eyebrow movements – say more than words could.

Most of the people on camera interviewed in the streets clearly know of her and her legacy, even though many of them deny that they do. Again, it is evident from their facial expressions that they know more than they let on. There is a real ambiguity in people’s testimonies about whether they do or do not know who she was and what she stood for. Young and old first deny any knowledge of her but soon admit to knowing where she lived or where she is buried. The film ends on an image of Eberhardt’s grave, so there is a sense of finality to the film. Nevertheless, what the structure of the last ten minutes or so of the film reveals is that even after her death, and in spite of the Algerian government’s efforts to erase her from local history, her spirit lives on in people extraordinarily dedicated to her legacy in writings, conferences, discussions and even in living life the way that she did. The oblivion she sought in Sufism, in becoming one with the spirit and escaping the boundaries of life and society, is achieved in her death and in the way her legacy lives on. As such, she embodied hope, not through her physical form (although this was important to her way of life and the love she found with Slimane) but in the entire body of work she left behind, which includes the way she lived her life.

Likewise, Ghofrane Binous realises it is not her body, her physical form that will enable her to reach her voters or the goals she has with her activism and political ambitions, but that the example she sets and the actions she takes will show her contemporaries how they can change their individual futures. She recognises the importance of her body of work, of dedicating her life and work to the cause she fights for. Despite the disillusionment with her chosen political party and the Tunisian government’s direction after the Revolution, she goes on to study Law. The hope for a better world has not died with her loss. On the contrary: she has a continued concern with the women of Tunisia, 10 years after the revolution, and with the political representation of Black Tunisians. She is aware that she is only one small part in a global movement for justice, seeing the Hong Kong protest movements, Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wallstreet as well as the climate crisis as movements inspired by the activism of young people like her around the world in similar struggles. Most of all, there is a realisation that all these struggles are not uni-directional, but rather multi-directional. In that way, learning from one’s failures, and turning that learning into a powerful tool for the betterment of one’s own and one’s community’s future is important. And once again, hope is a choice. While she may not have succeeded in her initial plan of becoming a politician (yet), she has shown resilience and realised that to change the world, Binous can start by changing herself. As a pragmatic young woman, she continues to face the struggle of everyday poor and Black and female Tunisians. Once again then, it is her life, the way she throws her whole being and living into the cause she fights for, rather than the limitations she has suffered, and it is her entire body of work, not her body, that leads to change. When it comes to the choice of living a life in the service of changing the world, both Binous and Eberhardt realise they need to change themselves and, in a way, sacrifice their bodies in the service of the cause. If Isabelle Eberhardt is an outsider looking in, dedicating herself to Sufism and a life lived truly independently from society, Ghofrane Binous is an insider looking out toward the world and the generation she is part of, of young people everywhere fighting for social justice.

Finally, Amari has learned from Eberhardt and Binous that changing oneself, and one’s process, can have a big impact. She says that making documentaries about these women has shown her that emotions, inner personalities and the power of movement can more directly be represented in documentary, and that the loneliness of being extra-ordinary and transnational lends depth to the experience. Perhaps transnational non-fiction films can assist transnational screen studies to reintroduce the human story, the physical and metaphysical experience of being transnational. The exuberant and difficult experiences of being transnational bring into focus the priorities of life, both on and off screen. Whether film is an object that successfully contributes to a financially unstable industry by travelling on transnational networks or not, these intersectional stories about the political consequences of personal lives lived across borders are important and contribute to transnational audiences’ understanding of important bodies of work. Both women in their own ways are important for the histories of the countries they function(ed) within, and for the destiny of their people. So, it became very important for Amari to reflect critically on her practice and her attitude to filmmaking. She says she will return to non-fiction more readily as it provided a freedom (with a small crew, lightweight equipment and less pressure from funders) she has not experienced in the larger fiction film industry (Green 2021). Moving away from the heavily industrialised system of fictional cinematic transnationalism and instead move toward the personal experience of localised non-fictional transnationalism imbues the films and the filmmaker with the confidence that she can function successfully outside the system. She does not have to wait for permission from anyone to do what she wants to achieve with her feminist, anti-racist films that function in the service of social justice.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefanie Van de Peer

Stefanie Van de Peer is Reader in Film and Media at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. Her research focuses on Arab cinema, women’s films and feminist film history. Some of her books are Negotiating Dissidence, The Pioneering Women of Arab Documentary (EUP, 2017), Animation in the Middle East (IB Tauris, 2017), Women in African Cinema (Routledge 2020) and ReFocus: The Films of Jocelyne Saab (EUP, 2021). She currently runs a Royal Society of Edinburgh-funded project on Global Women’s Film Heritage, investigating the myriad networks of feminist film activities in the second half of the 20^th century, with a focus on the Global South.

Notes

1. On 21 February 2023, ‘Tunisian president Kais Saied’s anti-sub-Saharan migrant speech, led to an escalation of violence against people in Tunisia racialized as “African”—a term used to denote bodies seen as Black, foreign and culturally and economically poor in the Tunisian social imagination. While contesting this state and civilian supported racist language and violence, Black Tunisian civil society members have invoked Law 50, passed in 2018, which criminalizes racial discrimination’ (Parikh 2023).

2. Films that presented portraits of student workers (Mon 14/My 14^th [2011] by Ismahane Lahmar), politicians (Fadhel Moussa, force et determination/Fadhel Moussa, Strength and Determination [2014] by Kalthoum Bornaz), electoral campaigns (Militantes/Women Activists [2012] by Sonia Chamkhi and Tunisiennes, sur la ligne de front/Tunisian Women on the Front Line [2013] by Feriel Ben Mahmoud), refugees (Réfugiées des deux rives/Refugees on Both Sides [2011] by Selma Baccar) and social change (C’était mieux demain/It Was Better Tomorrow [2012] by Hinde Boujemaa) have dominated women’s non-fiction production since 2011 (Rouxel 2022, 297), next to the globally acclaimed fictional work mentioned above.

3. M'nemty means ‘My dream’, hence the title of the film, She Had a Dream.