EXCLUSIVE: Tunisian actress and filmmaker Afef Ben Mahmoud has taken up the baton as director of the eighth edition of Tunisia’s Gabès Cinema Festival (Gabès Cinéma Fen), celebrating the moving image through cinema, video art and immersive works.
Launched in 2019, the festival also taps into the ecological challenges facing the Mediterranean port city of Gabès in Southern Tunisia, linked to an ageing chemical factory producing phosphate fertilizers, as a hub for thinking about a different future for the city and its local population.
Ben Mahmoud is best known internationally for her roles in Nouri Bouzid’s drama The Scarecrows, about two young women abused by ISIS fighters in Syria, and Mehdi Hmili’s Streams, about a woman trying to rebuild her life after being imprisoned for adultery, while she was seen most recently in boxing drama Round 13 by Mohamed Ali Nahdi.
She also broke into directing in 2023 with ensemble drama Backstage, about a theater troupe which gets lost in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, co-directed with Khalil Benkirane, who is well-known in the Arab world indie cinema scene as Head of Grants at Qatar’s Doha Film Institute. The film played in Venice parallel sidebar Giornate degli Autori in 2023.
“This choice comes at a pivotal moment for Gabès Cinéma Fen, which continues its aesthetic exploration and further solidifies its position as an independent festival, open to the free forms of cinema and artistic creation,” the festival said in a statement.
“Since its inception, the festival has aimed to be a meeting place for the visual arts, a space for collective reflection, and a testing ground, both in its artistic offerings and in its relationship with the public and the city.”
Ben Mahmoud told Deadline that she had taken up the role because the event resonated with her own artistic journey, both in front of and behind the camera, as well as with her personal cross-disciplinary exploration of the arts and cultural practices.
“My work has always navigated between different forms of expression – performing arts, acting, directing, producing – and the festival embodies precisely this cross-disciplinary approach,” she said.
“Since its inception, I have followed Gabès Cinéma Fen with admiration. It is a festival that supports independent cinema, embraces a strong local presence, and champions a demanding humanist and aesthetic vision. It is not simply about programming films, but about considering creation as an act of dialogue with a social, ecological, and political context.”
The event’s focus on building bridges between disciplines and fostering the exchange of ideas between creators and the public chime with her own work, she added.
“This is at the heart of my own artistic research. I firmly believe that cultural practice can transform how we inhabit a territory and share its stories. In Gabès, a region facing major social and environmental challenges, the festival becomes a space for collective reflection and shared imagination.”
The festival will run from April 26 to May 2.