Tunisian director Lotfi Achour’s new feature Red Path (Les enfants rouges) investigates the childhood trauma and attempted healing process of shepherd boy Ashraf (Ali Hleli) after he witnesses the beheading of his teenage cousin Nizar (Yassine Samouni). Inspired by true events which took place in November 2015 when the shepherd Mabrouk Soltani was killed by the Islamic State, the film bowed in the Cineasti del Presente competition at the Locarno Film Festival.
The two children are ambushed by a group of radical extremists in the mountains of Mghila in the west of Tunisia, close to the border with Algeria. It is an area which continues to see counter-terrorism operations and continued attacks against local Bedouins and villagers.
Following the incident, the traumatized Ashraf retrieves the head of his cousin, which his murderers left behind as a warning to the villagers not to go to the police. He then returns to his soon-to-be shattered family.
Ashraf is not only left to fight his demons, but also is confronted with the helplessness of his family, who like the majority of villagers in the area, are marginalized by the state and considered “less than nothing.” As part of being able to grieve for her son, Nizar’s mother demands the return of the full body, not just the head. The family waits for reinforcements from the state police, but in vain. Forced to take things into their own hands, they go to fetch the body.
Here the story splits into two concurrent narratives. In one the family treks through the harsh mountains where they are in danger of state police, terrorists, and landmines. But the second and more essential in Achour’s screenplay follows Ashraf’s journey to process the loss.
The family’s trauma is terrifyingly captured by Wojciech Staron’s cinematography, who along with Lotfi avoids the voyeuristic clichés “orientalising” villagers and Bedouins; instead the film strives to humanise their grief and mourning. Some 50 years after the incident, Ashraf is still processing his grief, and his mind escapes into a dreamlike illusion where he continues to converse with his dead cousin. These sequences show the complexity of post-trauma effects in an environment where there is no space and time (and maybe not enough medical tools) to help a person handle grief.
In Ali Hleli’s captivating performance (Achour deserves an A+ for casting), Ashraf was a good student who had to drop out of school to help his mother herd the goats, while his father was away working in Algeria. Here Lotfi poses difficult questions about the choices left to children and teenagers in such marginalized remote areas, far from busy and prosperous Tunis.
The villagers, especially the teenagers and adult men, are torn between working as informants for the state police, and hence named “snitches on the jihadists” or for the extremists and so labeled “collaborators for the apostate government”. Both fates are dangerous and potentially lethal.
As in his previous films Burning Hope (2016) and Père (2014), Lotfi remains concerned with the issues of his country. He particularly focuses on post-2011 Tunisia, a period which radically shook up society both politically and socially. Red Path kills two birds with one stone. It carefully and generally sheds light on the traumas of children in a conflict zone, a topic often ignored when it comes to feature films that engage with violence in the Middle East. It also emphasizes the suffering of civilians at the hands of terrorists and the apathy of the state, and the dilemma of being stuck between an authoritarian regime and a jihadist group.
Lotfi’s film should have no problems finding distributors in the Middle East and North Africa, a traumatized region that itself is freshly recovering from the nightmare of the Islamic State terrorist group.
Director: Lotfi Achour
Screenplay: Natacha de Pontcharra, Doria Achour, Sylvain Cattenoy, Lotfi Achour
Cast: Ali Hleli, Yassine Samouni, Wided Dabebi, Younes Naouar, Latifa Gafsi, Jemii Lamari, Salha Nasraoui, Mounir Khazri, Noureddine Hamami, Eya Bouteraa, Rayen Karoui
Cinematography: Wojciech Staro?
Editing: Ewin Ryckaert, Malek Chatta, Anne-Laure Guégan
Music: Jawhar Basti, Venceslas Catz
Sound: Aymen Labidi
Producer: Anissa Daoud, Sébastien Hussenot, Lotfi Achour
Co-producer: Gwennaëlle Libert, Tatjana Kozar, Jacques-Henri Bronckart, Joanna Szyma?ska, Edyta Janczak-Hiriart, Krystyna Kantor, Olfa Ben Achour
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (Cineasti del Presente )
In Arabic
100 minutes
