YALAN BU EL FOSFATE (CURSED BE THE PHOSPHATE)

Credits

Name: YALAN BU EL FOSFATE (CURSED BE THE PHOSPHATE)

Country: Tunesien

Year of publication: 2012

Format: Digi Beta

Color: color

Language : OF m. engl. UT

Duration: 80 Minuten

Direction: Tlili, Sami

Camera: Nechi, Hatem; Berrabah, Hazem; Romdhane, Adonis Nadhem

Editing: Amri, Achraf; Hammami, Anis; Hammami, Anis

Guest: Tlili, Sami

Abstract

5 January 2008 marked the beginning of massive protests in the Tunisian mining region, which would continue for six months. The movement was sparked when unemployed youths staged a sit-in in front of the town hall in the small phosphate mining town of Redeyef. Their names were Adnène, Bechir, Leila, Jemaa, Haroun, Moudhafer and Adel. They were trained teachers and mechanics, but couldn`t find work because none of the riches generated by the phosphate mining end up with the local population. The desperate young people demanded a life of dignity and triggered a broad movement of strikes. The Tunisian dictator Ben Ali, whose own clan pocketed the mining profits, answered by sending in 30,000 police and soldiers. Protests across the mining region were brutally put down, but without them, as the film’s witnesses attest, not without pride, the fall of Ben Ali’s dictatorship, which heralded the “Arab Spring”, would never have been possible. Director Sami Tlili documents in his multi-award-winning film not only historical events, but also what has become of the hopes of these activists in the “new” Tunisia.

  Trailer