Selma Baccar: Non-fiction in Tunisia, the Land of Fictions

Abstract

This chapter discusses a controversial icon of women in Tunisia, Selma Baccar, Tunisia’s first lady of filmmaking, an instigator and a fiercely independent woman still celebrated for her films and politics. Her first film Fatma 75 (1975) carried an intricately political statement of feminist defiance. The film looks at the time of independence and the subsequent struggle for women to gain their rights under the first president, Habib Bourguiba. Tunisia was a land of fictions, and even though Baccar roots her films in the reality of everyday life, most of them are essay films, due to restrictions put on the filmmaker by the Tunisian censor. Baccar, an intellectual artist, identifies strongly with her heroine and places her in a detailed historical context in order to analyse and critique Tunisian attitudes. She looks at past revolutions and women’s issues and in doing so, has served as women’s national memory. Her importance as documenter of the past has become central to 2011’s so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’, as she now sits on the Assemblée constituante (Constitution Assembly) composed of elected members who are making an attempt at re-writing the Tunisian constitution.