El Ziara

After a few years spent in France and in the West Indies, Jamil comes home as a broken man. He arrives in a bookshop in the center of colonial Tunis for a temporary job as a clerk. He is attracted to Aicha, 15 years older woman and the mother of the book shop owner Tarak.

Based on a true story, inspired by real-life events. Under the regime of President Ben Ali, Adel is partying at friends' house. His wife, distraught, calls him to warn him that the police are at their door. Adel panics. He fears being arrested for his subversive ideas. In his car, on the way home, dark thoughts cross his mind.

Like many young Tunisians, 24-year-old Ali Arbi dreams of living in France. Unfortunately, his multiple attempts to obtain a French visa have been unsuccessful. One day, his two grandmothers, Aïcha and Selma, who are twin sisters, decide, in collusion with their mother Naïma (90 years old), to reveal a long-concealed family secret to Ali.

In Tunisia, the history of stambali goes back to the arrival of the first enslaved Africans from Mali, Timbuktu specifically. Practicing their music and worship in the house of their masters, the enslaved and their musical traditions survive to this day. Stambali is a religious ritual in Tunisia, a journey with the rhythm of the "gombri" and "chkackek," traces an individual and collective hypnosis, an annual tribute that the disciples of Sidi Saad pay to their master during an initiatory journey and rite of purification that lasts three days. In "Stambali," the camera, video and film follow the rhythm of the possession, dances, and goes into a trance, in the cemetery, in an open space of grass, trees, dust and sand, in the eroticism that is released by this physical and spiritual representation.