Videoteca

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The Trace 1988
A determined young woman in a remote Tunisian city bucks tradition by studying for an academic degree, instead of accepting the time-honored, submissive role of her sex as a wife and housekeeper for some 'mustached man'.

Wanderers of the Desert 1986 star_border 6.5
A young teacher arrives to take over a village school isolated in the shimmering desert. Legendary figures materialize out of wells and the desert itself, groups of children hurry through a labyrinth of underground corridors, and the teacher is whisked away to a mysterious rendezvous and never returns.

Crossing Over 1983 star_border 6
Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud's first feature film.

The Balad of Mamelouk 1982 star_border 4
Mamluk is an unassuming, handsome young peasant who happens to have come along just in time to save the king from a fatal trap, and as a reward, the king offers him the amount of land he can mark off by walking around in one day but he must return to the starting point before sunset.

The Ambassadors 1975 star_border 6
“Each of you is an ambassador, and we are sure that each of you will be the best ambassador of our country.” This is how the film begins; a speech to emigrant workers for France. Salah left his three sisters and his mother to become an ambassador, going to work on a Defense site, wading in the mud, he works with a jackhammer. Salah wanders in search of work and housing. Coming up against racism from the owners claiming the respectability of the building and the good neighborhood, he finds himself in a hotel in the Goutte d'Or district. The body of Mehdi, friend of Salah, was found in the Canal Saint-Martin, murdered by a fascist commando, and Ali died of a bullet, killed by a racist janitor. Faced with crimes that remain unpunished, Salah and his friends organize, unite with the French working class to defend their lives and their right to work.

The Man Who Sleeps 1974 star_border 7.8
A young student decides to have no more interaction with the world than is needed to minimally sustain life. His increasingly automaton-like behavior is coupled with a strange clarity of insight about the world around him.

Ommi Traki 1973 star_border 10
Directed by Abderrazek Hammami.

Viva la Muerte 1971 star_border 5.8
At the end of the Spanish civil war, Fando, a boy of about ten, tries to make sense of war and his father's arrest. His mother is religious, sympathetic to the Fascists; his father is accused of being a Red. Fando discovers that his mother may have aided in his father's arrest. Sometimes we witness Fando imagining explanations for what's going on; sometimes we see him at play, alone or with his friend Thérèse. Oedipal fantasies and a lad's natural curiosity about sex and death mix with his search for his mother's nature and his father's fate. Will Fando survive the search?

Yusra 1971 star_border 1
On the evening of his birthday, the young painter Sadri walked out on his mistress Lisa, and the party planned in his honour. While ambling along the beaches of Carthage in the dead of night, he sees a young woman, as beautiful as she was enigmatic, completely nude, rise up out of the waves. She told him her name was Yusra. From that time on Sadri was to live a story of wild love and spellbinding erotism with the mysterious stranger, abandoning the heartbroken Lisa. While attempting to paint her portrait, Sadri noticed there was a strange resemblance between Yusra and Lisa. An old wise man whom he met in the ruins of Carthage, told him that Yusra was one of the names of Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, who sometimes comes back to earth in the body of a young woman. Sadri tries to solve the mystery of the origins of the beautiful stranger.

A Simple Story 1970
A documentary filmmaker goes to work on a project about Tunisians who have worked abroad. Many have married French women, and the couples try to adjust to France after many years in Tunisia. The man decides to forego the film in order to address the personal and social concerns of the people trying to cope in their new surroundings. This feature appeared at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival.

Eden and After 1970 star_border 6.1
A group of French students are drawn into the psychological and sexual games of a mysterious man called Duchemin. Once they sample his "fear powder" the students experience a series of hallucinations.