Tunisians used to say that one in five of their countrymen worked for the secret police. Leyla Bouzid was an aspiring young noughties film-maker in Tunis’s Fédération des Cinéastes Amateurs when she found out that one of her close friends in the club was an informer. It wasn’t an isolated experience. Of the paranoia that runs through her galloping debut feature As I Open My Eyes, about a rock group trying to find their voice and hold their nerve in the final months of former president Ben Ali’s rule, she says plainly: “These are things either that I saw, or that friends or myself lived through.”
Bouzid left Tunisia shortly after the informer incident to study literature at the Sorbonne, but returned as soon as she could, in fiction. As I Open My Eyes pivots around an incandescent performance from Baya Medhaffar as the corkscrew-haired chanteuse Farah, foolhardy and fiery in her determination to confront the regime. People’s Choice award-winner at Venice last year, it is a fine addition to a strong recent crop of feminist Middle Eastern and Maghreb cinema, including Wadjda, Mustang, the Moroccan prostitution drama Much Loved, and the Pakistani thriller Dukhtar. But for Bouzid, the film’s importance is precisely Tunisian; its mission to return to 2010 and the stirrings of what became the Arab spring. “It was very important for me to go back,” she says. “It’s true there was this revolution, and the world went: ‘Wow!’ But we didn’t go deeply into things at all. People took to the streets, but the problems were much more profound.”
As I Open My Eyes intimately explores the effects of living in a police state; both the all-pervasive fear and the self-censorship it produces in society at large. Farah’s mother, who tries to protect her by insisting she stop her rebellion, is her most visible enemy for most of the film. Ben Ali may be long gone, but such problems have not vanished: Bouzid cites the 2014 arrest of blogger Azyz Amami under law 52, an anti-drug measure still used by the Tunisian state to clamp down on youth expression. She is in no doubt that there is major work to be done if the country is to move forward. “I believe in the necessity of a cultural revolution in our country. Not just political revolution, but creating new forms of thought.”
Holding court the morning after her film has screened at Cinemed festival in Montpellier, the 32-year-old is getting into her stride. “Our young musicians and artists don’t have a voice in Europe today. We just talk about Daesh etc. [But] in times when there’s been a very, very strong kind of extremism, like during the wars of religion in the west, that’s given rise to a new thought. A rejection of extremism.” She tails off, almost wistfully. “It’s very personal. Maybe it’s just me that thinks that.”
She cast Medhaffar in the film, made for just €600,000 (£500,000), exactly because she seemed uninhibited by the past and ready to embrace new things such as a degree of sensuality unusual in films from the region (Bouzid worked as assistant director on fellow Tunisian Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour). “She’s very free in her head. She was one of the few people who didn’t say: I can’t do that because my mother and father wouldn’t like it.” There is, Bouzid admits, some correlation between herself and Farah. “I was also very free in my head, but I was smarter than Farah. I was aware of what I didn’t have the right to do, but I knew how to get around it.” She partly means romance – Farah’s second preoccupation in the film.
“Love affairs when you’re 18 in Tunis aren’t simple. Especially if you’re headstrong by nature. But it’s very Mediterranean, too; you see that idea in southern France or Italy. A girl with a thirst for life who doesn’t want limits. And a boy who really loves her, but can’t control her and gets possessive.”
Bouzid grew up with her mother, a GP and culture buff who introduced her to Citizen Kane and Bergman: ironically, although her father is Nouri Bouzid, perhaps Tunisia’s leading postwar director, he never took her to the cinema (her parents are divorced). Distancing herself from his reputation was another reason she decided to study in France.
“I’ve got a good rapport with my father, but I try to progress on my own, a way off from him. He read a version of the script, but I didn’t let him come on set. My production company has never worked with him. That was important for me: he’s someone with strong opinions; you can’t take it for granted that you’re going to form your own.” They both make socially conscious films – her father’s 1986 debut Man of Ashes dealt with homosexuality in Tunisia, and 1989’s Golden Horseshoes with the failure of the country’s May 1968 protesters – but in different ways. “He said I relate violent things with a caress, but he does it with claws,” says Bouzid.
Actually, As I Open My Eyes has both at its disposal: in musical terms, both the crepuscular laments narcotically delivered by Farah, and punky rai moshpit-botherers. All were purpose-written by Iraqi-British oud master Khyam Allami to fit lyrics by Bouzid’s poet friend Ghassen Amami. Small gestures, but hopefully resonant ones in keeping with the director’s idea of a DIY cultural revolution that might actually take hold in the scorched earth that has killed the Arab spring. “There’s been a long wait for cinema for young people. There’s a Tunisian audience, but also in other Arab countries, waiting for this kind of film that gives voice to this kind of energetic youth.”
• As I Open My Eyes is showing at Safar film festival of contemporary Arab cinema on 17 September. The festival runs from 14 to 18 September.
• This article was amended on 3 September 2016. The original stated Khyam Allami was Syrian-British. This has been corrected.
