Harka rages against rising desperation in post-revolutionary Tunisia

• Reviewed at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

One of the inciting incidents of the Arab Spring was the self-immolation in December 2010 of a 26-year-old street vendor called Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia. The result of prolonged precarity and years of harassment by state officials, his violent death proved a lightning rod for nationwide unrest at the endemic corruption that made so many Tunisians’ lives nigh-on impossible. Large-scale protests ensued, the country’s president was ousted the following month, and the rest, as they say, is history… except that it isn’t; not really. The years have passed but the old problems of inequality, corruption and injustice are still present, and are the subject of a furious denunciation in Harka, an impressive fiction debut by the Egyptian-American director Lotfy Nathan.

Ali (Adam Bessa) is a brooding young man with a tormented soul. He spends his days flogging black-market petrol out of jerrycans on a street corner, and his nights sleeping in an abandoned building site. All the while, he is stowing away cash with a plan to head for Europe. His loneliness and isolation are only partly alleviated by his ne’er-do-well pal Omar (Najib Allagui), with whom he has little in common except poverty.

This hardscrabble life is already as claustrophobic as an escape tunnel, but the prospect of freedom shrinks further when Ali’s brother (Khaled Brahem) turns up to tell him their father has died, and leaves their younger sisters, Alyssa (Salima Maatoug) and Sarra (Ikbal Harbi) in his care. Things turn even worse when a collector arrives from the bank with the unwelcome news that Ali has inherited his father’s debts along with his responsibilities. There appears to be some trauma from an unexplained past event which instigated Ali’s alienation from his family, and which even now has him preferring to sleep in yard rather than take a room in what is in effect his house.

But Ali is no passive victim of circumstance. He takes on more risk ferrying the bootlegged fuel cross-country; he seeks out his brother to demand financial help; he even tries to get the city to give him his father’s old job, which he believes by rights should be his. But he is stymied at every turn, and a simmering fury begins to build.

In the way it addresses social injustice, Harka is both character study and thriller. Eli Keszler’s soundtrack provides a pounding percussive agitation that perfectly suits Ali’s pent-up rage; Maximilian Pittner’s camera probes Ali’s mental state as it starts to splinter, while also vividly capturing all manner of wider settings, from chaotic urban streets to dreamlike landscapes. The drives to the border give the film more scope, and Ali the opportunity to move up the criminal hierarchy, but even here it’s a game of snakes and ladders, and the young man soon finds himself back at the beginning.

All the while, Bessa’s performance coils tighter and tighter. Ali is a man of few words, but there’s nothing impassive about his silence: when he begins to lose his grip on his situation, it becomes clear that he’s a lit cigarette surrounded by explosive fuel. The bribery he has to contend with doesn’t just rob him of money, it leaves him without a place in the world, without dignity. A brief visit to a tourist resort gives an idea of the gap between him and the wealthy first-world visitors, who look through him as if he doesn’t exist. Ali’s occasional expressions of affection – especially toward Alyssa, to whom he gives a puppy – are telling: teaching her to pick up the puppy by the scruff of its neck rather than cuddle it, he could be expressing his own attitude to love.

Alyssa is also the chronicler of the film, providing a voiceover narration that turns Ali’s story into a fable of sorts. This attempt to humanise Ali from the outside, to contain him in a family drama rather than see him nakedly on his own difficult terms, risks coming off as a compromise; director Lotfy Nathan might have trusted his audience more here. But Alyssa’s contribution provides an important female voice in a very male world of injustice, and her framing of events is a minor distraction in a film with such a persuasive and powerful accusation to make. Nathan offers a deeply pessimistic view of Tunisia’s predicament. The poor are still desperate, and now, the film’s ending suggests, even the most extreme measures might no longer provoke popular protest.