Film: Tomorrow was Better
by Hinde Boudjemaa
Tunisia 2012
Documentary, 110 min, Arabic ENG ST
Guest: Leyla Dakhli (IREMAM / Centre Marc Bloch)
This is the second part of the "Beyond Spring: Arab Film Series" from May 21 - June 6 in cooperation with Mayadin al-Tahrir e. V. and the Werkstatt der Kulturen.
This sensitive direct cinema documentary follows of a homeless woman and mother of four children in Tunis during the first year after the Tunisian Revolution.
Tunisia is considered the most progressive Arab country with regards to gender equality and personal status law. The discussion will try to assess today’s situation after the appearance of the Islamists as political players.
Hinde Boujemaa is Belgian-Tunisian. Since 1997, she has worked on several feature films as a make up artist and costume designer. In 2006 she studied scriptwriting. In 2009, Hinde wrote the screenplay Under Paradise which won the Sud Ecriture award at the Carthage film festival. In 2012, she made her first documentary film, It was Better Tomorrow. The film was in the official selection of the 2012 Venice Film Festival. Hinde Boujemaa was moreover awarded the Gold Muhr for best director at the Dubai Film Festival. She is currently preparing her first feature film.
Leyla Dakhli is a researcher in Aix-en-Provence (France) at the IREMAM (Institut de recherche et d’études sur le monde arabe et musulman). She is a historian, and her work focuses particularly on the study of Arab intellectuals, cultural, and social history of the South Mediterranean region.
Viola Shafik, PhD, is a freelance filmmaker, film curator and film scholar. She authored among others Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, AUC-Press, Cairo, 1998 and Popular Egyptian Cinema: Gender, Class and Nation, AUC-Press, 2007. She lectured at the American University in Cairo and the Zürich University and is in the selection committee of the Rawi Screenwriters Lab and the Berlinale World Cinema Fund. She directed several documentaries, most notably Ali im Paradies/My Name is not Ali (2011) and Arij - Scent of Revolution (2014). Currently she teaches at the Humboldt University, Berlin and the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich.