Jamming civilizational discourse: Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker

Abstract

This essay analyzes how El Fani's 2003 feature-length film engages and counters Tunisian cultural politics. For international film audiences, Tunisian film is characterized by often visually stunning, feature-length films focusing on social struggles, particularly those of Tunisian women, in the pre- and post-independence eras. After exploring how these films have been co-opted by a state-sponsored civilizational discourse that allies Tunisia with western modernity, my essay examines how Bedwin Hacker resists similar recuperation on both visual and narrative levels. Adapting the popular genre of the hacker film, El Fani offers viewers a glimpse of innovative Tunisian self-fashioning to re-engage Tunisian audiences at home and reach out to international spectators beyond the festival circuit. Her border-crossing heroine, who hacks the airwaves to insert playful, cartoonish messages about the existence of alternate realities on French television, elaborates a feminist activism that exceeds the roles assigned to Tunisian women by the state. At the same time, the film challenges the limited roles available to women from the South even within an allegedly globalizing world. Thematically, El Fani's film draws upon only to unsettle the tropes of otherness on which the popular, global media in both the West and the East depend, while visually it represents the formerly taboo in ways that break with the conventional techniques of representing women and men in Tunisian cinema and beyond. Thereby removing the veils that condition northern views of the Arab South, Bedwin Hacker also re-envisions contemporary Tunisia.