Gods, Weeds and Revolutions

Against the backdrop of the Arab Spring in 2011, a young woman returns to her family in Tunisia to take the pulse of her native village and, more importantly, the pulse of her loved ones she left behind when she emigrated to Canada. Is this the story of the director, the Tunisian-Canadian filmmaker Meryam Joobeur, or an autobiographical tale told through another person? It doesn't matter. In this twenty-minute documentary, the personal and intimate nature of this return to origins, filled with beauty and pain, is immediate and enchanting. They speak of the horrors experienced, childhood memories, the present of aging grandparents, and regrets. But it is the images that speak the loudest. Joobeur opens and closes her incursion into these people's lives in the same way, with long tracking shots of the village alleys, the walls of the houses, the door of the family home—moving forward to open, then backward to close, as if slipping away after sneaking in. The entire film is carried by these slow, fluid, contemplative camera movements. Joobeur approaches this world gently, delicately, to observe, to look, to take stock of the state of things and the effects of time. On the grandfather, ravaged by Alzheimer's disease, yet somehow reinvested with a certain childlike innocence (his gaze, almost childlike again, is heartbreaking). On the grandmother and the Tunisian women, who have finally found a certain form of freedom, but not without the weight of responsibilities and memory that accompany it. And on her country, after the reverberations of the Arab Spring and the fall of the dictatorship. Joobeur films all this with great modesty, evident love, and a poetry of the moment filled with benevolent melancholy that leaves us in a kind of reverie.

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer