Taht el shajara

Every year in Tunisia, under the merciless June sun, fruit pickers, mainly women, harvest the fig orchards in order to ensure that the delightful fruit are on our tables. The job is hard, the wages are meagre and the working conditions are based on the authority of the harvest supervisor. Starting with these documentary premises, Erige Sehiri crafts a sophisticated and very delicate fiction that follows the pickers’ working day from dusk till dawn. Their life, their dreams, their quarrels and sorrows unfold as they carry out their exhausting task. The dialogues are started and paused, the singing and the fights are heard in distance, and the tensions resonate in a labyrinth of trees where our protagonists move and search for each other. In this house made of leaves and light, the destinies intertwine in such a spontaneous and natural way that the emotions of the protagonists leave the screen and kidnap the spectator’s attention from beginning to end. Erige Sehiri manages to stage the whole destiny of Tunisia in a single orchard, where different generations of people struggle every day to survive amidst the lost promises of the revolution. (Rebecca De Pas)

Erige Sehiri: FAMILY ALBUMS (2012), AL-SHATAT (2018, K), RAILWAY MEN (2018), ÉTUDIANTS (2018, K), LE CHEF DE GARE (2020, K)