Red children: in the heart of horror (critic)
The Tunisian Lotfi Achour recounts the black decade dominated by a bloody terrorism that his country suffered in perfect balance between realism and fantastic.
Everything starts here from a true story and yet never Lotfi Achour does realism the spine of what constitutes his second feature film, nine years after Tomorrow from dawn, Unpublished in French theaters despite its selection of the fifteen directors. This first film featured the cross destinies of two young women and a teenager in a post-revolution Tunisia. And Red children tells him, Tunisia of the black decade, that of the 2010s starting from an unbearable tragedy: the assassination in November 2015 of a young 16 -year -old shepherd in the heart of the Tunisian mountain by jihadists who forced his cousin to bring his decapitated head to his family. One of the rare terrorist crimes to have targeted civilians who had made the headlines.
The implementation of the story is very rapid here because the essential is elsewhere, in the way Achour will deal with collateral gesture damage for the victim’s family and even more for this cousin. He could have opted for something very literal. But there was the risk of adding horror to horror, not to climb up to his words. He chooses to focus on the psychological impact of such trauma in the young boy who survived and goes for that through the prism of a fantastic carefully distilled, up to a 13 -year -old boy. And his poetic dreamlike only reinforces the cowardice and horror of the initial gesture, in a perfect balance between sweetness and hardness.
From Lotfi Achour. With Ali Hlali, Wided Dadebi, Yassime Samouni … Duration: 1h38
