Writer and Director: Meryam Joobeur
This film from Tunisia always looks beautiful throughout its two-hour running time. The countryside and seashore look expansive, while the intimate close-ups of the protagonists make up for the few words that are said. The chilling story follows mother Aicha as she realises that her two eldest sons have run off to join ISIS. Her fear and shame are palpable.
“Does that mean they are terrorists now?” asks youngest brother Adam to the local policeman. When the reply comes in the affirmative, he confesses that he still loves his two brothers. In the early part of the film, we worry that policeman Bilal (Adam Bessa) is a recruiting agent for ISIS and that he will begin to groom the schoolboy, leaving Aicha with no sons at all.
But life at the farm on the edge of the land must go on. There are goats to herd, and there is firewood to collect. The family’s existence on the farm is primitive, and Bilal’s smartphone seems incongruous in such a situation. Aicha and her husband know that if their sons do return, the young men will face time in jail. They are not the first boys in Tunisia to be lost to ISIS.
The first part of Who Do I Belong To is entitled The Aftermath and explores the first few days after the brothers have departed. This is the best part of the film, and we are shown Aicha’s grief and her husband’s humiliation. Later, we discover that the brothers left because of the father’s behaviour. While we never get to learn exactly what his behaviour entails, we can surmise that it was the pressure Brahim (Mohamed Grayaâ) put on his boys to take over the farm someday in the future. Indeed, Brahim seems keen to teach Adam how to fix a tractor, but Adam is more interested in playing with his friends.
Cleverly, we never see the lure of modernity. We remain in the eternal pastoral, which is both bleak and idyllic. Sand dunes, where bright red flowers grow, roll down to the beach, but the wind and the rain make this world a hard one, too. Purples and whites feature heavily in director Meryam Joobeur’s palette.
However, the story loses some of its appeal when the eldest brother Mehdi returns with a new bushy beard and a wife in a niqab. He says little but admits that the other brother has been killed. His wife says nothing at all; her blue eyes staring fearfully out of the cloth are unsettling and scare Adam in particular. It’s a surprise to learn that she wears a covering even though she is not Muslim.
With this woman’s arrival, Who Do I Belong To changes tack, and the switch in the narrative, which now tends to the mystical, isn’t fully satisfying. But the images that Joobeur creates on screen, in a tight ratio, ensure that the film doesn’t completely lose its power. The close-ups of the brothers’ freckled faces, a shot of colour in the shadows, are hauntingly striking. Medhi’s guilt trickles through his pores.
Joobeur has gathered an impressive cast for her debut feature. Salha Nasraoui is Aicha, the mother torn apart by her sons’ actions. Medhi, played by Malek Mechergui, is a brooding powder keg, while Rayene Mechergui gives a remarkable performance as young Adam. But the real star here is the camera and Joobeur’s painterly vision. And Peter Venne’s score is the perfect accompaniment to such beauty.
