Raja Amari

“Sensual Performances, excellent acting and the great Arabic music only add to the film’s garden of earthly delights.”
– Flaunt Magazine

A widowed Tunisian seamstress takes an unlikely journey of self-discovery in writer- director Raja Amari’s sumptuous and sensual Satin Rouge. While investigating a suspected liaison between her headstrong teenaged daughter and a cabaret musician, young widow Lilia becomes drawn to an exotic nightclub netherworld of Rubénesque belly dancers and nocturnal pleasure- seekers. She strikes up a friendship with one of the dancers, then eventually takes the stage herself-quickly becoming the favorite of both cabaret patrons and the club’s hot-blooded drummer. As she gradually sheds her shapeless, matronly housedresses for the flamboyantly sequined bar-girl garb, she also begins to emerge from her cocoon of melancholy and loneliness.Read More »

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Aicha, Radia and their mother live removed from the world in the underground servant’s quarters of a deserted mansion. The precarious balance of their daily life is shaken by the arrival of a young couple who move into the main house. A bizarre cohabitation settles between the couple and the three women who decide not to make their presence known to these unexpected neighbors. They cannot leave their hiding place as it conceals secrets buried for years. But Aicha, the youngest sister, is attracted by the newcomers.Read More »

In the turbulent aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, young Samia (Sarra Hannachi) flees her homeland. She braves hostile seas in the crossing to France, but once there she finds that her struggles have only just begun. With no friends, no family, and – most crucially – no immigration papers, Samia has to figure out how to make a life and a living in a foreign land.

She meets a young man, Imed (Salim Kechiouche, Blue is the Warmest Color), and soon finds work in the employ of the elegant Leila (the inimitable Hiam Abbass, subject of an In Conversation With event at the Festival this year). But her presence in Leila’s middle-class household triggers a shift in its dynamics, and soon Samia is enmeshed in a web of sexual tension.Read More »