TUNIS — The
Tunisian director of “Under the Fig Trees”,
which portrays young harvest workers, said she hoped the award-winning drama
film would “smash the cliché” that rural women are “miserable and closed”.
اضافة اعلان
Erige Sehiri told AFP her first feature-length work
relates the secrets, love stories and resentments of the mostly female orchard
workers who live in the countryside but are “modern and connected”.
The young women pick fruit in rural
Tunisia but are
hyper-connected and use social media to eke out their freedom, in contrast to
their older colleagues who live in a more conservative world.
“Our young people are so modern, just like
everywhere else in the world,” said Sehiri, 40.
The fig orchard, near the town of Kesra, “represents
a space of liberty for workers, especially the young ones, where they can talk
and discuss everything freely,” she said.
Shot in the blistering summer heat of Tunisia’s
marginalized north, the characters are played by actors from similar
backgrounds — all amateurs who normally have harvest jobs or work at wholesale
markets.
“It’s a film inspired by real events, things I’ve
heard from women farm workers who work hard all year, and high school students
who come in the summer,” the director said.
The young women, sometimes helped by a young man,
pick soft ripe figs which are then packaged by older workers, under the orders
of a bossy young man representing the traditional patriarchal structure.
The symbolism extends to the trees themselves,
representing the hardships of life, while the mature figs reflect the girls’
discovery of sensuality.
The film, a co-production involving France, Tunisia,
Qatar, Switzerland, and Germany, will hit screens in France on Wednesday and
premiere later in Britain, Italy, and Belgium.
It has been shortlisted to represent Tunisia at the
Oscars next year, having won awards at film festivals in Tunisia, Belgium and
Germany as well as the Ecoprod prize at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.
Solidarity
Produced on a budget of just
300,000 euros, the work is “a film on the individual and the collective,
because one doesn’t exist without the other, they go together”, Sehiri said.
It looks at the links of solidarity between the
women, who share their food and dreams of freedom.
At the end of a hard day’s work, the young workers
make themselves pretty and take selfies for their social media.
One of the main characters, Fide, is played by Ameni
Fdhili, a student who picks cherries for extra cash in the summer.
Fide and her friends are portrayed as realists and
somewhat jaded, aware of a lack of economic opportunities — or even the choice
of who to love and marry. But they also let themselves dream of another
destiny.
The film also shows older women, tired by years of
hard work and social restrictions, who spend their break times snoozing or
discussing their medical problems.
For Sehiri, the contrast creates a “mirror effect”.
“Perhaps these workers reflect the future of these
girls, and at the same time, they’re nostalgic for their own youth.”
The director said she had given the actors the
freedom to improvise dialogues and was “pleasantly surprised by their ability
to express themselves simply, sincerely, and spontaneously”.
Sehiri said the critical acclaim for the film had been
“extraordinary” and that “it couldn’t be better for a first fiction film played
by amateurs”.
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