Police firing teargas at revolutionaries belting out the Tunisian anthem: this and other striking images of ordinary people dismantling a dictatorship will hit the big screen at Cannes this month.
"No More Fear," a 74-minute documentary, was shot on HVD film in the midst of the uprising that led to Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s political demise on Jan. 14, its director Mourad Cheikh told AFP ahead of the screening at the Cannes film festival on May 20.
The Cannes showing ends an 11-year absence for Tunisia from the big screen.
The creator of short films like "Le Patre des Etoiles" (The Shepherd of the Stars) made in 2003, Cheikh said the selection was "unexpected."
"We sent a copy of the film to Cannes, we worked like crazy. At first they responded that we were not selected, but later an assistant (of the festival) informed us that we had it," said the director who divides his time between Tunisia and Italy.
Amid a rush of last-minute preparations for the screening, Cheikh explained that the title was inspired by "a slogan that appeared on the walls of Tunis during the revolution."
"The slogan symbolizes a wall of fear that collapsed" in Tunisia, he added.
The film, in Arabic with English and French subtitles, was shot on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba in Tunis, the epicenter of the revolt.
"It was a matter of urgency for me," Cheikh said. "I had to shoot: the police, the people who ran after the teargas was used."
Three main characters feature in the film: human rights lawyer Radhia Nasraoui, blogger Lina Ben Mhenni and ordinary citizen Karem Cherif, representing all Tunisians "who defended their neighborhoods against looters and snipers."
A character in the film laments the pre-revolution state of his country and says: "This revolution is not the fruit of poverty, but rather the cry of despair of a generation of graduates.
"It is neither the bread nor the jasmine revolution. Jasmine does not result in death, does not give rise to martyrs," the character says, referring to an early nickname for Tunisia’s revolution.
"It is the revolution of a people’s devotion. … We shall never again have fear!"
This sums up, said the director, the average Tunisian’s frame of mind: "That of the youth who made the first revolution of the virtual era as well as the older people who defied fear in order to resist the yoke of dictatorship."
For film producer Habib Attia, the screening at Cannes increases the likelihood of distribution on European markets and in Gulf states.
Two images of the revolution remain etched in his memory.
The first involved two young policemen blocking a crowd of protesters from Bourguiba. "Facing the crowd chanting the national anthem, these two started crying; they understood that their place was with the protesters. Their tears released mine," Attia said.
In a later incident, "I really cried when a friend recounted to me the last words of a youth after he was shot: ‘I will not die and if I die, I will not leave before he (Ben Ali) leaves’."
The young man died and Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia.
