There Marlene Dietrich place Luigi Noera

(from Berlin Luigi Noera with the kind collaboration of Maria Vittoria Battaglia and Vittorio De Agrò of the editorial staff Ground floor– The photos are published courtesy of the #BERLINALE)

The Theme of Jiad in the tragedy of the Tunisian film #WhoDoIBelongTo presented in #Competition

Synopsis: Aïcha lives on a farm in northern Tunisia. His eldest sons Mehdi and Amine went to war. When Mehdi returns home with a mysterious pregnant wife, a darkness emerges that threatens to engulf the entire village.

More the Aïn (#WhoDoIBelongTo) di Meryam Joobeur | with Salha Nasraoui, Mohamed Hassine Graya, Malek Mechergui,

Adam Bessa, Dea Liane – Tunisia / France / Canada / Norway / Qatar / Saudi Arabia 2024 | WP | First work

Review:

The film, although discounted as a first work, is a remarkable feat of authorship, especially in directing all the protagonists into great silences with intense gazes..

The incipit reminds us of the infinite: a tree in an endless meadow. We will find him again in the tragic ending.

We witness a wedding party which is a premonitory sign of what will happen.

The story of a couple of Tunisian shepherds overwhelmed by grief over the disappearance of their eldest son who forcibly joined the jihadist forces.

The father's gaze into the infinite sea to find his son says it all about what will be a drama of our times.

While the mother shares the pain for her son with a friend of hers who shares her destiny. The drama of a peasant family who is aware that one of their children is a terrorist but seen from two different parental points of view.

The desire to preserve the youngest child from this harsh reality at all costs pervades the first part of this tragedy of polarization towards models of hatred.

Suddenly the son returns home with his wife, also a jihadist who wears a burka. The parents have no hesitation in hosting him, although their father doesn't want them at home, the mother insists that they stay until the birth of her grandson.

The ending leaves no room for hope, in fact the Jihadist son is instigated to stone his guilty wife according to sharia and out of great pain he commits suicide by throwing himself off the cliff.

His parents have to suffer the loss of their beloved son for the second time.

And here comes the initial scene of the tree in an endless field at the foot of which the young son is buried.

luigi Noera