With her film As I Open My Eyes, writer-director Leyla Bouzid has made what is arguably the best narrative film about the Arab Spring.
The reason it works so well might be because she chose to set her debut film during the summer of 2010, in the months before the demonstrations and the overthrow of dictators started to change the geopolitical landscape.
In many ways, the story is typical. Set in a Tunisian under ground scene of hip bars and bands that fuse Mezwad with pop, it follows Farah (Baya Medhaffar), a teenage girl who just wants to be able to go out, drink and play in her band. But she is no waster or dropout. Farah is an ace student with the grades to get into medical school.
That she feels like such a real character is possibly because Bouzid put some of herself into Farah.
“There are some elements that are biographical, not everything – the personal stuff is very different from me,” she says. “But one thing that is true is that I belonged to a cinema club and was good friends with someone. I then went to Paris for six months and when I returned I found out that he had been a police agent that had been spying on us.”
Bouzid was at pains to accurately portray the feelings of young people at the time, especially in the creative scene. To that end, Farah is a singer in a rock band. She performs songs that demand change, yet at no point does she get the feeling that a revolution is coming.
Original article by Kaleem Aftab
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