Noura’s Dream
2019 | 92 minutes | Tunisia, Belgium, France, Qatar
Director: Hinde Boujemaa
Writers: Hinde Boujemaa, Laurent Brandenbourger
Language: Arabic
Best Acting, Carthage Film Festival, 2019
Best Acting, El Gouna Film Festival, 2019
FIPRESCI Prize, Torino Film Festival, 2019
At once a searing critique of divorce laws in Tunisia (even after the ‘Arab Spring’) and a moving portrait of a remarkable, tenacious woman, Noura’s Dream is a gritty realist drama about love.
Noura works in the laundry room of a hospital, earning money to look after her children as a single mother, as her deadbeat and abusive husband, Jamel, is in jail. Dreaming to get away from him and start a new life with her lover, Lassad, she has secretly started divorce proceedings. Things are shaping up well until Jamel is unexpectedly granted a presidential pardon and is released from prison.
Now stranded between a husband who expects the marriage to get back to normal and a lover growing impatient for her to leave, Noura finds herself in a complicated, even dangerous new personal crisis fuelled by the threats of her husband and the limitations imposed by society’s stubbornly rigid patriarchal social codes.
After all she has endured, what will Noura have to do next to realize her dream? Featuring a powerhouse performance by the incomparable Tunisian star, Hind Sabri, Noura’s Dream is an astonishing tale of struggle and resilience. This very impressive first feature by Tunisian writer-director Hinde Boujemaa had its world premiere in the ‘Discovery’ section of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
- Tom McSorley
Screenings
THURSDAY, MARCH 26
6:30PM
Stay after the screening for a director Q&A
Presented with the support of the Cultural Services of the Embassy of France in Canada
Preceded by the short film
Volcano
Hannah Cheesman and Jess Salgueiro are friends whose respective efforts to disclose what’s going on in their lives over cocktails may have some telling omissions.
What begins as a lighthearted, friendly catch-up quickly becomes something more serious, introducing an important theme that will carry through from Volcano into the feature presentation, Noura’s Dream.
Director in attendance
Hinde Boujemaa