Director: Kaouther Ben Hania | Tunisia | Hybrid | 2014 | 90 mins
Film source: Jour2fete
Sponsor: The Caroline Fund
One of the more interesting films in this year’s festival, Challat hovers elegantly and humorously between documentary and fiction. It’s 2003 in Tunisia and a man on a moped drives around slashing women’s backsides. A mysterious figure, nicknamed Challat, he spawned many legends. 10 years later, Director Kaouther Ben Hania, in post-revolutionary Tunisia, goes in search of the truth. But the truth is elusive and rumors abound. Ben Hania’s focus is on the “collective conscious of people and the fantasy around it and what it tells us about us, so I had to set up stories to explain this”, she says in an interview at the Dubai Film Festival. Fact meets fiction in the way the narrative is set up, nothing is what it seems as Ben Haniya steers us through the film’s many threads. These stories are the backbone of the film which has its hilarious moments (wait for the Virgin-o-meter); but the harsh reality of men’s attitudes toward women never eludes us. “However”, says Ben Haniya, “what has changed is the fact that now you can talk about it.”