Zizou

By Ferid Boughedir

2016, Tunisia, 99 mins
7:15pm on March 16, 2019
6:00pm on March 17, 2019

About the movie

Aziz nicknamed “Zizou”, young unemployed graduate, leaves his village on the border of Sahara for Tunis, the capital in quest of a job. He becomes installer of satellite dishes on house roofs. Still keeping his honest and candid soul, he mingles with all kinds of people – from the pros of the despotic regime to the islamist clandestine opponents, as well as with the new rich, greedy for easy pleasures, and with the lower strata who are getting poorer, but remain “macho” … meeting with innocence misogyny and vulgarity, meanwhile discovering the stamina of the modern Tunisian woman that makes up for male weakness. One day, while working on the terraces of the beautiful village of Sidi Bou Saïd, he falls madly in love with a girl, who looks locked up by a mafia group close to the regime. Henceforward, his dream is to set her free. This quest for love becomes his reason for living, and he will proceed unconsciously against the tide of the Revolution that is about to burst in Tunisia and so, trigger in the whole region the crazy hopes of a “Spring” of freed peoples! Through his clumsiness and naivety, he will come across hundreds of adventures and end up an unwilling hero!

About the director

Ferid BOUGHEDIR, who was born and lives in Tunis, belongs to a dynasty of “cultured” family of the Medina. His grandfather was a bookseller in the souks of Tunis, and his father was a playwright, short story writer, journalist and calligrapher. Ferid Boughedir was a film critic for many years, specialized in African and Arab cinemas – which he taught in Tunis University – and the objects of many of his publications, and of his two celebrated full length documentary films, “Camera d’ Afrique” and “Camera Arabe”. Ferid revealed his first feature film “Halfaouine” (boy of the terraces), in 1990 at Cannes Film Festival. It received a worldwide critical and public success with a great number of awards. It remains today the most famous Tunisian film in the world. His second fiction feature film “A Summer in La Goulette” (1996) was selected for the official competition of the Berlin Festival before receiving the award of the Paris Biennale of Arab Cinema. Ferid Boughedir was then successively a member of the Cannes, Venice, and Berlin official juries; President of Ouagadougou Pan-African Festival, and Director in Tunis of the Pan-African Festival of the “Journées cinématographiques de Carthage” (Carthage film Festival).