Quote:
In Tunisian director Ala Eddine Slim’s experimental second feature, a soldier deserts his unit and lives on his instincts in the woods.

An experimental anomaly on the Tunisian film front, writer-director Ala Eddine Slim has won a following with two films that leave logic and realism behind to chart a muddy course through the minefield of experimental-apocalyptic narrative. Although their meaning is hard to grasp (perhaps on purpose?), they have attracted attention. After Eddine Slim’s first feature The Last of Us was shown in New Directors, New Films in New York, his new but cut-from-the-same-cloth Tlamess turned up in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. Wherever these enigmatic, schematic and often pretentious works are shown, their basic lack of dramatic truth haunts them and they run the risk of hearing frustrated audiences demand the emperor put some clothes on.

Nudity is actually quite germane to Eddine Slim’s world-view, as both films end up in forest wastelands uninhabited by human beings, where the hero strips to the buff to indicate he is disgusted with society and has discarded the false trappings of the modern world. In both cases, the decision to drop out has a social-political motivation. In the more controlled and comprehensible The Last of Us, a young African man risks life and limb crossing the desert in a desperate attempt to reach Europe but fails; he ends up becoming part of the forest in which he takes refuge.

Tlamess takes the trick of using characters as abstract ideas even farther, into more puzzling dimensions. A young soldier known only as S. (played by poet and musician Abdullah Miniawy) is deeply disturbed by the violence of the army and the way his unit is forced to hunt down and kill terrorists. When he is given leave to attend his mother’s funeral, he holes up in his empty family house until the MPs come after him. Then he flees in a long, engrossing manhunt sequence, until he realizes that there is no place in the civilized world to hide. A long tracking shot follows him, now completely naked, into the woods to meet his destiny, while the stirring music of Oiseux-Tempete announces a fateful turning point.

This leaves the film at exactly the place where The Last of Us became a metaphorical rejection of the cruel contemporary world. But instead of meeting an experienced woodsman/shaman like the hero of the first film, S. himself, now long-bearded and wearing rags and primitive weapons, becomes the silent guru for a young wife (Souhir Ben Amara) who has grave misgivings about sharing a luxurious bourgeois life with her husband. S. frightens her in the woods one day and when she regains consciousness, she is his prisoner in an old well. Though life on a camp bed ankle-deep in water can’t be pleasant, she comes “under his spell” (the meaning of “tlamess”) and accepts her captivity under his Tarzan-like protection with happy passivity. She is also pregnant, a fact S. pins his hopes on for some reason. The future of humanity?

It should be mentioned that the woods are magical. Yes, there is a big black screen meant to be some kind of portal in a hidden part of the forest, protected by a giant and genuinely frightening CGI snake. When this creature licks the woman’s swollen belly, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen. Though the director has boldly compared his black rectangle to Stanley Kubrick’s alien monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it remains a clumsy citation whose meaning is totally unclear. The whole setup of the escaped soldier reverting to a wild state seems lifted from Jerzy Skolimowski’s thriller Essential Killing, which features an escaped Taliban soldier surviving in the forests of Poland. And just like Vincent Gallo’s terrorist in that pic, S. opts to remain silent throughout Tlamess, though he’s not a mute. A scene in which he and the woman communicate with their eyes alone, in subtitled dialogue, is something neither Kubrick nor Skolimowski thought of.

1.52GB | 2h 01m | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/87448B92CBA21BA/Tlamess_(2019,_Ala_Eddine_Slim).mkv

Language:Arabic
Subtitles:English (hardscodded)

The post Ala Eddine Slim – Tlamess (2019) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

With no dialogue, The Last of Us tracks a Sub-Saharan man through the desert to North Africa where he steals a boat. When it breaks down in the middle of the sea, he begins an imaginary surrealistic odyssey where he meets an older man, who might be an altered version of himself, and, in a wild landscape, rediscovers his relationship with primary nature. “A philosophical fable on being lost” (Giona Nazzaro).

Awarded with the Lion Of the Future in the 73rd Venice Film Festival (2016)

“Against the blindness that dominate states and for the freedom of man and woman, there is one possible territory: that of imagination, where borders do not exists anymore. Cinema does not belong to any territory and faces the insanity of our present. Images and sounds therefore become our daily bread. For more than a week I crossed faces and landscapes, the energy that watches over the Lido. I want to thank the team of the Venice International Critics’ Week, the jurors, Biennale, and all the erratic spectators who dream of cinema with their eyes wide open.” (Ala Eddine Slim – Director)

“The Last of Us (Akher Wahed Fina) by Ala Eddine Slim is a debut film that not resembling to anything seen in contemporary cinema, positions itself at the center of our present and of the world. A visionary and realistic work that re-launches the primacy of the gaze while facing the most serious of humanitarian emergencies of our present, offering a very powerful image of what the future of cinema can bring.”  (Giona A. Nazzaro -General Delegate of the 31st Venice International Film Critics’ Week)

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Production notes
The film was independently produced without any public subsides by 4 production companies with a small crew of passionate and mostly volunteer young people. They eventually received financial support for post-production from Hubert Bals Fund, Doha Film Institute, AFAC and SANAD. “Conceived by a united and dedicated team, The Last of Us is a human adventure that is uncommon in the Tunisian cinematic landscape. It is the author’s first full-length feature film, and the first feature film produced by four self-funded production companies. It is a piece of work that has blended all the Tunisian territory from North to South in harsh conditions and in a tense security atmosphere. It is without dialogue, annihilating borders between fiction and documentary film genres” says Ala Eddine Slim. The casting was another creative process, since the leading role is performed by Jawher Soudani, also known under the nickname VaJo, a multidisciplinary Tunisian artist, from street-art to creating his own clothing brand. His first time performance on screen, without any dialogue, is literally breathtaking. DOP Amine Messadi is one of the most talented photography directors of his generation. His professionalism and dedication have given birth to a number of collaborations with international filmmakers including Abderahmane Sissako and Nabil Ayouch. THE LAST OF US was selected in the post-production works in progress of the FID Lab in Marseille this year, where it received the prize “Video de poche”.

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Ala Eddine Slim
Ala Eddine Slim was born in 1982. He is co-founder of the Tunisian production company Exit Productions. He directed several short films and video-art works, including The Fall (2007), A Night Among Others (2008), The Stadium (2010) and Journal of an Important Man (2010). He co-directed the documentary Babylon, that won the Grand Prix at FID Marseille in 2012. The Last of Us is his first feature film.
http://nitroflare.com/view/0EFDA7D74475141/The.Last.of.Us_Eddine.Slim_2016.Ri-Ye.mkv

Language(s):No dialogues
Subtitles:English, Arab

The post Ala Eddine Slim – Akher Wahed Fina AKA The Last of Us (2016) first appeared on Cinema of the World.