Director – Lotfi Achour – 2024 – Tunisia, France, Belgium, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Qatar – Cert. 15 – 100m
*****
When paradise is suddenly taken away from him, a young innocent must come to terms with stark and brutal forces of corruption and death – searing drama is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 20th
** SPOILER ALERT**
Two boys are herding a flock of sheep cross-country. The older one (Wided Dabebi), who tells the younger not to be scared, but to watch out for mines, knows his way around. The younger one Achraf (Ali Helali) hasn’t told his mother he’s doing this, because he knows she would have forbidden him from coming.
They are navigating the slopes of Tunisia’s Mighila Mountain, which is fabulously beautiful. They find a perfect place to give the sheep a rest, and the older one shows the younger a good spot – they climb to the top of a ridge, with a stunning, panoramic view of the local landscape, and bask on the rock in the sunshine. Life is good. In fact, it is paradise. After some time, they head back down to the watering hole they left earlier, plunge their heads in the cool water. They relax. And then, suddenly…
Two men grab them from behind, demanding of them what they are doing here, and beating both boys’ heads against the hard rock surface. When Achraf comes to, face bloodied, he plays dead, observing his clearly dangerous assailants and sizing up the situation. His friend’s boot is near his head, so when the assailants have gone, he grabs the foot to get his friend’s attention – only it isn’t his friend, it’s another of the men who jumped them. This one has something for the boy to take back to his mother: Nizar’s severed head.
Traumatised, Achraf puts the head in a polythene bag and that bag in a battered, clothes shoulder bag which soon has a large bloodstain at one end, and returns to his village (which feels like little more than the house in which Nizar’s mother lives and a small, well-kept tree, but then this movie was made on a shoestring and in this particular case it’s not really a problem) rescuing a solitary lamb en route. A mall, turquoise fragment of the bag snags on a fence he goes through, ignoring the No Entry sign.
Once home, he hides the bag in the tree and sees Nizar sitting on a branch. Achraf seeks out Nizar’s sweetheart Rahma (Yassine Samouni) – of whom he has fond memories of her hanging out with his late friend – to tell her what has happened. He finds this understandably difficult, and she is grief-stricken once she’s heard the news. She is naive enough to think that the village adults will know what to do.
Nizar’s mother is even more upset, and after the menfolk have put her son’s head in her fridge to stop it decomposing, she stands inside her house staring at the fridge. She wants the rest of her son back so his head and body can be buried together. Achraf, meanwhile, talks to Nizar’s ghost – which no-one else appears to be able to see – while Rahma revises for her exams and Nizar’s brother takes charge of the process of going back to the forbidden mountain to retrieve the headless corpse. Achraf must go with them, since he knows where to find the body. Unlike the carefree Nizar, they make a point of looking out for landmines…
This is based on a Tunisian incident from 2015. A sombre title at the end informs us that the real life younger boy on which Achraf was based met the same fate as his friend some 18 months later, which lends the whole thing an extra poignancy. The breathtaking, letterboxed landscape compositions – the locations feel like anyone could point a camera anywhere there and deliver amazing results – and the accompanying, initial euphoria of paradise contrasts sharply with the unexpected assault on the two boys and its aftermath, which latter element comprises most of the film.
These are poor people who not only have nothing – they also, for the most part, lack hope. The whole reason that Nizar fell in with terrorists (for that is what the men who killed him apparently are) was because he had to do something – anything – to earn some money, and this would appear to be the only game for miles. Yet he is an optimist, and something of his sheer joy at being alive not only translates to us on the screen but also spills over infectiously to Achraf’s outlook. That changes in a second when Nizar’s poor judgement comes back to bite him, as does Helali’s natural, unaffected performance, which proves more than capable of carrying the film.
Director Achour, here working on his second feature following Burning Hope (2016), weaves a deft path between such unlikely companion elements as coming-of-age, landscape, community trauma, violence and ghost story to come up with something entirely original. Not only that, but aside from the locations, which are a gift to a filmmaker, he achieves what he does with minimal resources and a cast of unknowns. As has been noted on these pages from time to time, much of the onscreen success of all this is down to script – the director knows the story he wants to tell, and has honed it on paper before shooting – yet it is also extremely well cast, a very necessary step in successfully bringing a story such as this to the screen.
Beautifully shot by seasoned Polish cinematographer Wojciech Staron and expertly paced by Tunisian editor Malek Chatta, this transcends its deceptively simple story, to speak powerfully of poverty, injustice and loss. Made with minimal resources, it feels like one of those productions where everything comes together to produce something very special. It is rendered all the more powerful given that the coming of age material has an undeniable transgressive quality to it.
Full marks to Sovereign Distribution for picking up this unexpected gem and getting it out into select UK cinemas. As with many such movies, it probably won’t be around long, so you’re advised to seek it out and watch it this week before it disappears.
Red Path is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, June 20th.
Trailer: