Choosing to Be “Not a Man”

In 1995, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris celebrated one hundred years of Tunisian cinema with a comprehensive film retrospective that lasted three months. The main essay in the printed program was titled, “Un cinéma sans tabou,” and it suggested that the Tunisian cinema is unique (among the Arab countries, at any rate) in its willingness to confront the major taboos of contemporary society: sexuality, the status of women, the Jewish question, government power, Islamic fundamentalism, the cultural identity of the country, and so on.