Tunisian cinema takes centre at the French Arab Film Festival near Paris
Tunisia shines at this year's 'Festival du Cinéma Franco-Arabe de Noisy-le-Sec', the French Arab Film Festival, held every year in Seine-Saint-Denis, near Paris, to showcase rare and expected films from North Africa and the South West Asian region. This year's edition offered documentaries, fiction and debates to an ever-growing audience. Melissa Chemam reports.
-
"In this beautiful cinema, for ten days, we will discuss cinema—that is to say, imagination, experiences, and perspectives on the world," Mathilde Rouxel, head of cultural programming of the Festival du Cinéma Franco-Arabe de Noisy-le-Sec, the French Arab Film Festival, held every year in Seine-Saint-Denis, near Paris, at the opening event on 7 November 2025.
"For ten days, our eyes will be riveted on images and sounds from Arab countries and diaspora communities, allowing us to dream and travel together from the comfort of our seats in this darkened room," she added.
She reminded the audience that, as headlines report inhumane massacres perpetrated by paramilitary militias against the inhabitants of El Fasher in Sudan, or on the GenZ protests in Morocco, the festival wants to offer deeper perspectives on the realities of North African and Arab countries.
Honouring Tunisian stories
For this 14th edition, from 7 to 16 November, the festival had a special focus on Tunisian films.
Rouxel told RFI that "this year we have this focus about Tunisia because they have a huge cinematic production, and it was also very interesting for us to, to move from, from the, the east to the west of the, of the region. Uh, and yeah, we wanted to have, uh, these people to talk about, like, the whole region."
Some important social and political topics are regularly covered by filmmakers, in fiction and documentary films, in countries where journalists often struggle to address them.
"Topics like exile, and the need for the youth to find a better future and for some trying to move to Europe", Rouxel added. "We have for instance this new film by Ala Eddine Slim, whom we know in France because he is used to showing his film in festivals as much as in cinemas. We present his film 'Agora', which is new. It is talking about the post-revolutionary era and the atmosphere now in Tunisia, outside of the capital especially, in the countryside of Tunis. It is, I think, a very important film."
The festival also had a short film programme, with films made outside of Tunis as well, by filmmakers who didn't study in cinema schools.
"We have three short films and the directors are here to discuss them with the audience. It's a way to give them visibility and to have different views on what's happening in the country," Rouxel added.
From Tunisia to Egypt, Sudan...
The special guest of honour this year is also the French Tunisian journalist and documentary filmmaker Hind Meddeb, who is presenting many of her films about Tunisia, but also films shot in Egypt and in Sudan during their recent revolutionary episodes.
"I'm French-Arab, like the festival," Meddeb said at the festival's opening night. "I grew up in France, so I'm culturally French, but at the same time, my mother is Algerian and Moroccan, and my father is Tunisian, so I always spent my holidays with my family in North Africa. And then my mother lived in Egypt, she lived in Syria. So I visited her and I was between these two worlds, between France and Africa, between France and the Arab world."
She explained how she was always surprised by the way the Arab world is represented in Europe and especially in Western media, compared to what I her own experience of the Arab and Muslim world
"So, I thought to myself, I'm going to make films to tell stories differently, to show a youth that we don't know here. And so all my films tell the story of young people fighting for freedom."
Her latest films, 'Sudan, Remember us', followed young Sudanese activists in Khartoum after the overthrow of the long dictatorship Omar El Beshir, in 2029, and chronicles the military crackdown that followed.
She interviewed dozens of Sudanese in Sudan for over her decades for this project but also others.
"Thousands upon thousands of people have been killed in just a few days recently in El Fasher, Darfur," Meddeb reflected, "and "he deep causes of the war are often not addressed in the media. All these films I make, I make them for the same reason this festival exists, to tell the stories in a different way."
Her other films shot in Tunisia and Egypt were also shown at the Trianon Cinema, in Romainville, and in Paris's Institut des Cultures d'Islam (ICI, or Institute of Islam's Cultures), in Paris.
...and beyond
The festival, which lasted 10 days until Sunday 16 November, also showed Palestinian films, like the awaited fiction film 'Palestine 36', directed by Annemarie Jacir, out in the UK now and to be released in France in January, and the Iraqi masterpiece 'The President's Cake', directed by Hasan Hadi, which chronicles the life of Iraqis during the US embargo of 1990-91, following Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.
The latter had its world premiere at the Directors' Fortnight section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival in May 2025, where it won the section's Audience Award and the Caméra d'Or. It was also selected as the Iraqi entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, or Oscars. The award ceremony will take place in March 2026 in Los Angeles.
The festival also supports production of films in the Arab world, via strong partnerships, like one with the French Institute in Amman, Jordan.
"This year, we have at the festival a young Jordanian filmmaker, Bayan Abuta’ema, who won an award during the Amman Film Industry Days at the Amman International Film Festival for her film in development about Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan," Jessica Batshon, cultural attaché at the Institute, told the audience.
The festival showed films coming from Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as well.
"We chose a film on Syria under and after Bashar, I think it's something that we need to see," Rouxel told RFI. "We chose two beautiful films coming from Egypt as well, The Settlement by Mohamed Rashad and Spring Came On Laughing, by Noha Abel, that are films that are showing contemporary Egypt in many different ways."
The Settlement addresses the precariousness of life in Alexandria through the eyes of a young man's desperate attempts at social integration. It was described as "a milestone for the Egyptian film industry" at the Berlinale earlier this year.
Finally, other films show the lives of North Africans in European diasporas.
On both weekends were also organised roundtables to give the audience and guest space to discuss what cinema can bring as "a tool for struggle and solidarity", Rouxel concluded.
