A Window Into The Dark Heart Of Society

Award-winning Kaouther Ben Hania is one of only two Arab directors to have their film premiered at Cannes this year. Emirates Man takes a look at what to expect.

In early November last year the director Kaouther Ben Hania was applauded as she approached the stage at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunis. Dressed in a glittering gold and turquoise dress, she was awarded the festival’s most prestigious prize – the Golden Tanit – and won the admiration of assembled stars and dignitaries from across the Arab world in the process.

Here was a Tunisian director with the capacity to impress. She had won because of Zaineb Hates The Snow, a feature-length documentary centred on a nine-year-old Tunisian girl and her family, who move to Canada following the death of her father in a car accident. Although the win was a high point in her career, she said at the time that “touching stories with a pinch of poetry could teach us all about family relations”. Indeed, it was the comedy, loss, hope and ambivalence of Zaineb Khelifi, her mother Widad and younger brother Haythem that ultimately stole the show. Now Ben Hania’s career is about to take an even further leap.

Her second feature film, Beauty And The Dogs, is to be screened in May as part of Un Certain Regard, a section of the Festival de Cannes that recognises young talent and encourages innovative and daring work. The film is one of only two from the Arab world, the other being Karim Moussaoui’s Until The Birds Return.

“There are things that affect me in cinema and I look for them in reality because I know they are there,” says Ben Hania of Zaineb Hates The Snow, which received $10,000 from Abu Dhabi’s film fund, SANAD, and further funding from the Doha Film Institute.