Lotfi Achour: “Doing red children has become essential to me”

The filmmaker returns to the writing of the script for this striking film which tells one of the most tragic pages known by Tunisia during the black decade.

At the origin of Red childrenthere is the assassination of a young 16 -year -old shepherd in the heart of the Tunisian mountain by jihadists who forced his 14 -year -old cousin to bring his decapitated head to his family. What made you want to take this cruel tragedy?

Lotfi Achour: This abject crime took place in 2015. And it was the shock that I had felt that pushed me quickly enough to start writing a script around him, in the company of Natacha de Pontcharra, the very first by my side with producer Anissa Daoud. We had perceived that there was in the macabre staging of death by the jihadists something that was going beyond a simple crime. But it was still necessary to find out how to get caught up. And obviously we did not immediately find the solutions. So we set it aside and started working on another film, a black comedy, for which we started the search for funding. And then there was a second assassination, the victim’s brother, killed a year and a half later. And that’s when the decision to do Red children was really taken.

For what reason?

This second crime was less publicized than the first. But the political dimension has become even more important because the rulers of the time settled nothing in the process, did not take their responsibility. It is as if we had all abandoned this poor mother. And making a film around that had become essential to me.

Red children: in the heart of horror (critic)

Your responsibility has been to find out how to seize this story with a fiction. What was the first step?

It was a long process because the first version of the script dates from 2018. At the start, I imagined a film that would have only told the trip of the little cousin in the mountain with this beheaded head that he must bring back to the family. We did not find something to feed a whole film with this bias and we therefore given up. But the idea remained to experience this story in the head of this child, in his vision of crime and his consequences. Hence the appearances of his cousin after his death and his dialogues with him who shoot the film towards the fantastic. But the writing was complex because this story had marked us so much that taking the essential distance to give birth to this fiction took time. The covid and the forced break he involved undoubtedly played in our favor. It was in any case at that time that I decided not to go see the mother of the victim before I finished writing the script. I had enough factual elements and I think I did not want to feel as a depositary of his word with the permanent anxiety of betraying it. It was not an easy choice to make, I assure you. But I decided to trust fiction, our feelings.

When did you feel the finished writing?

We were fortunate to be selected on the Global Media Makes Independent program to rework our script with Natacha and Anissa. It is usually a residence of several months in Los Angeles. Covid obliges, we had to do everything from a distance. But this experience solidified our scenario. And then, at the end of this process, Anissa offered to do a consultation with those who in the end became the two other co -scriptwriters of the film – Sylvain Cattenoy and Doria Achour, my daughter – because she had already worked with them. And their contribution was decisive to reach the filming version. The eighteenth!

How have they been decisive?

By inventing several sequences but especially by greatly purifying the dialogues. What changed the climate of the film, allowed the fantastic to take up even more space compared to the realism of the situation.

Were you able to see the mother of this beheaded child once the scenario is finished?

No, because she unfortunately died in 2020. But today, we were able to find this cousin who had to bring his head to the family as well as the victim’s second brother. And I’m going to do everything so that they can discover the film if they have the desire of course.

From Lotfi Achour. With Hali Hlali, Wided Dadebi, Yassine Samouni… Duration: 1h38. Released May 7, 2025