Raja Amari (Tunisia)

This chapter focuses on filmmaker Raja Amari. Amari was born into a middle-class family in Tunis in 1971. She studied French literature and civilisation at the University of Tunis I, before going on to study film at FEMIS in Paris, from which she graduated in 1998. Before making her first feature, Satin Rouge (2002), Amari made three short films, beginning with The Bouquet/Le Bouquet (1995). Her best known short is April/Avril (1998), an atmospheric thirty-minute piece shot in 35mm and dealing with a ten-year-old girl, Amina, who comes to Tunis to work as a maid to two lonely sisters. In 2004 Amari completed her first video documentary, Tracking Oblivion/Sur les traces de l'oubli, which deals with an emblematic figure in North African feminism, the nineteenth-century European explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who lived with all the freedom of a man and had a particular regard for the spartan life of the Bedouin tribes.

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