Ismail Ben Abdelghaffar

Under the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia, on October 7, 1991, a man was abducted, tortured in prison, and eventually killed for allegedly belonging to an Islamist movement. Unaware of her son’s death, Kamal Matmati’s mother would still go above and beyond for years, trying to reach him with letters and clean clothes. Thirty years later, a trial is held addressing Matmati’s death at the hands of the Ben Ali regime. The mother is asking for her son’s corpse so they can give him a proper burial. Matmati’s voice, who speaks to us posthumously, raises a discussion about the manipulated collective history that serves only the oppressors’ agenda.

Under the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia, on October 7, 1991, a man was abducted, tortured in prison, and eventually killed for allegedly belonging to an Islamist movement. Unaware of her son’s death, Kamal Matmati’s mother would still go above and beyond for years, trying to reach him with letters and clean clothes. Thirty years later, a trial is held addressing Matmati’s death at the hands of the Ben Ali regime. The mother is asking for her son’s corpse so they can give him a proper burial. Matmati’s voice, who speaks to us posthumously, raises a discussion about the manipulated collective history that serves only the oppressors’ agenda.

Combining two contradictory terms in a single phrase is called an oxymoron. Circumventing the obvious, shaking up the logic, proceeding in gusts, claiming the impossible, such is the method that Baya Medhaffar has chosen and, adopting an ancient motto, she makes it clear right from the title: “Make haste slowly”. There are several explanations for this speed proclaimed yet slowed all at once. Her film is mostly made of edited, assembled images from other films; thus, all the emergencies from other works reach a climax here, but as they overlap, they also call for their patient and detailed examination. The dishevelled editing is combined to a superimposition technique that makes scales collide, that associate separated figures and backgrounds, and that ties together in the same frame seemingly unrelated dynamics and lines of forces.

Torn between the life he thought he could leave behind in Tunisia and the life he’s created for himself in Marseille, a man finds himself at a crucial crossroads, in Nejib Belkadhi’s latest.

The city of Lambèse is the scene of torture, both physical and moral, for the resistance fighters of the Algerian War. In the form of a fictional account adapted from the novel "Le camp" by Abdelhamid Benzine, the conditions in the special camps of the colonial army, where we accompany a group of detainees, in their daily life animated by violence are depicted. are former Nazi officers, whose mission is to abandon all resistance, and all ideological faith, through humiliation and drudgery.