I come from a village in the small valleys of the Matmata Mountains in south-eastern Tunisia. When I was a child, people lived by rough farming, spending their days digging in the dry land and their evenings drinking tea around the fire, and the old men telling stories to the children.
The arrival of electricity allowed the arrival of television, which changed our way of life. We forgot the fire, the tea and the stories that go with it, the evenings changed colour and the stories found new storytellers.
As we saw these images, we began to feel the desire to go and see the wonderland they showed us.
Today, a good number of young people from my village work in Europe, in France, more precisely in Paris, which they discovered on a small screen in the 1990s.
Behind them, the deserted village becomes even more deserted. On the other side of the screen, Paris, immense, becomes even more immense.
The film takes place between these two spaces and will seek the meaning of the journey from one to the other.
– Saber Zammouri
After studying theatre in Tunis and making his first collective film in 2014 – MEZZOUNA APRES LA CHUTE, Saber Zammouri moved to Paris in 2017. There, he shoots a documentary and develops a fiction with his French partners.
Through history, war, migration, conquests, etc., he draws the contours of the world from this small village perched on the mountains of south-eastern Tunisia.
His work transforms his village into a cosmos.