EL HARA
Tunisia | France | USA
13 min
French
HD video, Stereo, color
2017
For over 700 years, thousands of Jews lived in El Hara of Tunis. Albert Memmi grew up here. As a Tunisian Jew, he struggled to find his place between the European colonizers and the Muslim colonized. Since then, the neighborhood’s Jewish residents have moved on, but Memmi's memories still dwell here. EL HARA visually drifts through this neighborhood 75 years after his departure, weaving together his lucid reflections on the residual effects of colonialism, domination, and emigration.
Directed by Marguax Fitoussi, Mo Scarpelli
Produced by Margaux Fitoussi
Cinematography by Mo Scarpelli
Edited by Iva Radivojevik, Mo Scarpelli
Produced by Rake Films
FESTIVALS / EXHIBITIONS
+ New York Jewish Film Festival at Film Society at Lincoln Center
+ Dar ben achour bibliothèque de la Medina de Tunis
+ Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
+ Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies
+ CUNY Sandra K. Wasserman Jewish Studies Center, New York
+ Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities, Jerusalem
+ 22° New York Sephardic Film Festival - Pomegranate Award for Rising Star
+ Centre d'Études Maghrebines, Tunis
+ Toronto Jewish Film Festival
+ Washington Jewish Film Festival
+ Alexandria Mediterranean Film Festival
+ Herceg Novi Film Festival
+ Atlanta Film Festival
+ Atlanta Jewish Film Festival
+ San Diego Jewish Film Festival
+ Citizen Jane Film Festival
+ MountainFilm Telluride Film Festival
+ Woods Hole Film Festival
+ Port Townsend Film Festival
+ Santa Cruz Jewish Film Festival
+ Los Angeles Sephardic Film Festival
+ Rome International Film Festival (USA)
+ Université de la Manouba, Tunis
+ The Screening Room at Society for Cultural Anthropology
watch the film here >
"In a lyrically captivating journey into Tunis’ old Jewish quarter, Margaux Fitoussi and Mo Scarpelli’s EL HARA explores the present-day echoes of the departure of its historical inhabitants in the wake of colonial and national upheavals. Interlacing the quotidian sights and sounds of El Hara with Albert Memmi’s texts, reminiscences, and commentaries about his formative years there, the film deftly captures the dissonances of a multi-layered Jewish-Maghrebian-French identity.
EL HARA, by evoking the ambivalent emotions surrounding Jewish dislocation from Arab/Muslim spaces, subtly touches upon the scars of rupture and loss. While the film returns physically to El Hara, it also reckons with the impossibility of going back to a pre-displacement past, conjuring up instead an imaginative return around an absence that still haunts."
— Ella Shohat
Professor of Cultural Studies, New York University
& Author of Taboo Memories & Diasporic Voices