Mehdi's desire for redemption from a humiliating past, symbolised by an heavy, old door leads him on a cathartic journey that results in the destruction of the door with purifying fire.

 

 

  DIRECTOR'S NOTES

 

It all started one sweltering Saturday afternoon in October in Hammamet, in the hall of a renowned hotel, falsely reconstructed, in the touristy centre of the Tunisian town. After the usual weekend meetings, while working on an epic Roman TV movie, my assistant and I, Moez Ben Hassen, my close friend and scriptwriter of the short film in question, looked around, searching for something to talk about. That is how it happened that, while we were observing an Oriental reconstruction of an ‘arbi’ (ancient arabic) freize, roughly carved in wood, I asked myself why I should find myself, for the fourth time in three years, in Tunisia making a film that had little or nothing to do with the wonders that such a 'virgin' country held within its territory. Kilometres and kilometres of celluloid shot in Tunisia for the purpose of giving life to stories of saints and ancient Roman heroes, while the real, living Tunisia with its stories past and present crying out to be told, passes by the film without being able to make an impression on it. Moez didn't hesitate to taunt me, saying that it was always me who involved him in those epic Roman projects. I was quite ready with a response: “Give me an idea of an Arabic story to be filmed, and I will love and nurture it”. It was from there that I started, completely by chance, our collaboration on this project.

 

How important are doors in our lives? Think of the countless expressions in which they are mentioned: 'the seven doors of heaven', 'at the gates of Hades', the very ordinary 'door of the heart'. And also, the doors behind which we keep objects of incalculable value or the doors that keep secret rooms in which lovers hide. A person's mood can depend on a door. How many open doors have we come across in our lives, or alternatively how many have we found closed? How many doors have been slammed in our faces, causing us unspeakable pain?

From the Door's adopted metaphor of love, joy, pain, humiliation or more simply life, our project is born, that claims, hopefully not disappointingly, to tend towards a form of poetry through images, according to the logic that a full-length film is to prose what a short film is to poetry.

 

My short film tells the story of Mehdi, a Tunisian man of modest origins who, having made his fortune in Europe, returns to the land of his birth, to the house of the young girl who was the love of his life, to redeem himself from a series of humiliations he suffered when he was young due to his humble origins. The destruction of the door that long separated the adolescent Mehdi from his love is symbolically the only way to free himself from the insults and frustrations of his past. Close to that door many scenes of happiness and pain are experienced by Mehdi and his childhood playmate. The narration, explicitly drained of naturalistic elements of storytelling, is spelt out in a series of flashbacks whose visual account is mixed in with the main narrative.

Unhinging the door starts a long, cathartic journey for Mehdi, who takes the door with him towards an undefined place, metaphysical, the desert of the court of memory. On this journey the landscapes, first green and Mediterranean, become ever more arid. The door is dragged through dust, in accordance with an epic gesture that recalls the humiliation of dead bodies in the Iliad. Mehdi advances through the sand pulling behind him the weight of the door and what it represents with fatigue and suffering, like an abandoned Christ that drags his cross of pain, alone. The humiliation persists in his memory, though, and the door doesn't seem to want to get scratched despite Mehdi's anger and determination. Only fire, the purifying element, is able to crack the solidity of the wood, igniting the door and all the skeletons it contains; a mysterious fire that expands over the precious woods of the imposing monoliths in a magical atmosphere, charged with ancestral fear. An immense bonfire rises in the pre-Saharan desert sky, obscured by a sandstorm that makes it sombre and suffocating. From what is left of the burnt door a message emerges from the past, a voice of love and pain, of anger and comfort that leaves Mehdi and the spectator shocked and confused in the desert night, at the mercy of a silent poem that echoes back to the deepest of human sentiments.

 

 

  BAB AL SAMAH - FESTIVALS and AWARDS