Death and life in a Tunisian police procedural

Daniel Nelson

Director Mehdi Barsaoui asked a couple of provocative questions when discussing his film Aicha: Does one have to die to be free in Tunisia? Has death become the only resort to reach true emancipation?

The question arises because the central character, Aya, lives at home with her parents and feels trapped. She works as a hotel chambermaid and is coming to the end of an evidently unsatisfactory affaire with the manager, and also has to help her mother, who wants her to marry an older man as a way of paying off the parents’ debts.

There seems no way out - until a terrible traffic accident occurs.

There are multiple deaths, and an unexpected opportunity.

But life has other unexpected twists in store as she tries to establish a new, freer life in he capital Tunis. As Barsaoui says in the notes for a screening at the recent Venice Biennale: “In her pursuit of life, Aïcha faces numerous obstacles: family authority, submissiveness, misogyny, sexism — and more generally women’s place in society. Above all, she confronts the corruption and oppression of the police, their omnipresence and omnipotence over the population.”

It’s an adventure, but you have uneasy sense that something - a chance encounter, an exposed cover-up lie, the lack of ID papers - could cause her life to start to start to unravel.

It does. You fear for her as her statements about an incident in a night-club begin to shift and re-shape under police questioning and a fierce reaction on social media, feeding on anti-authority confidence burgeoning in the light of the Arab Sping.

It’s a police procedural, a pacey caper, with the interesting addition of glimpses of Tunisian life and times.

And it has a big final twist.

Entertaining.

• Aicha is screening as part of the BFI London Film Festival