Tunisian Filmmaker Selma Baccar Presents Second Annual Evelyn Myers ‘37 French Lecture

February 05, 2009 |

From Selma Baccar's film Khochkhach, or The Flower of Oblivion

Tunisian filmmaker Selma Baccar will present her film Khochkhach, or The Flower of Oblivion, at Goucher College’s Second Annual Evelyn Myers ‘37 French Lecture on Thursday, February 5, at 7 p.m. in Kelley Lecture Hall. This event is free and open to the public.

Based on a true story and set in the early 1940s in Tunis, this film follows young, aristocratic Zakia, who becomes addicted to khochkhach (poppy tea). The drug provides an escape for both her physical suffering after a painful childbirth and the mental anguish she bears from her sham marriage. Zakia soon plummets into addiction and is forced into an asylum, where she finds solace in relating to other Tunisian women fallen from society and sanity. However, thanks to the friendship of a man who presumably killed his wife, she regains her self-esteem and love for life.

In this film, Baccar continues her focus on women at different moments in Tunisian history, boldly crossing lines in the Arab world by discussing taboo issues such as a woman’s need for sexual fulfillment and homosexuality.

Baccar shot her first short film (10 minutes) in 1967, L’éveil / The Awakening, a portrayal of the daily problems faced by a young woman student who wants to be free from her parents’ increasingly invasive authority.

Her first full-length film, Fatma 75 (1977), covered the history of women in Tunisia from the Carthaginian era to 1975 through a montage of evocations and interviews. Although the film was partly funded by the government, and although its credits thanked President Habib Bourguiba for his role in promoting women’s equality through the Code du Statut Personnel, it also showed that in Tunisia in 1975 there was still ample room for improvement (for example, women did not have equal pay; when applying for a passport, they needed their husband’s authorization). The film was banned after it was decreed that some of its contents (e.g. a sequence on sex education in school) were unfit to be shown to the public; a copy of the film remained in the vault of the Tunisian Ministry of Culture’s film collection until the ban was lifted in time for a 2006 Selma Baccar retrospective in Marseille, France.

Baccar’s second feature film, Habiba M’Sika / La Danse du feu / Dance of Fire, released in 1995, was a biopic of Habiba M’sika, an adulated Tunisian star of the 1930s. The tragic fate of the singer/dancer/actress (who was burned to death by a jealous lover) is depicted not as a study in victimhood, but as the result of a passionate affair with life on and off stage. The film was generally well received at international film festivals, including the Middle East International Film Festival.

At Goucher’s screening, Baccar will introduce the film and answer questions following the screening. A translator will facilitate the discussion. There will also be a presentation of a short feature about what young filmmakers are doing now in Tunis.

This event is sponsored by the Evelyn Myers ‘37 Endowed Lecture Fund, which enables the Department of Modern Language and Literature to present a lecture or other event to expose students to French and Francophone culture, language, and literature.