Although she now performs in the political arena, Salma Bakkar has presented her ideas as courageously today as when she was a film director. She continues to challenge taboos, especially those related to the economic, social, and sexual rights of women.
Although she now performs in the political arena, Salma Bakkar has presented her ideas as courageously today as when she was a film director. She continues to challenge taboos, especially those related to the economic, social, and sexual rights of women.
She stepped into the world of politics through its wide open gate— the National Constituent Assembly (NCA)— on October 23, 2011 and has discovered that the cinema is a bearer and reflector of peoples’ concerns and politics is the direct action for addressing them.
Bakkar was born in Tunisa in 1945 and graduated from the French Institute of Cinema. She directed emotionally stirring films like: ‘The Fire Dance’ (1995), narrated by a Tunisian protagonist of Jewish origin and ‘Poppy’ (2005), which follows of a female protagonist who becomes addicted to drugs.
A Political AwakeningIn 1990, she became the first female Tunisian producer when she founded a private production company. In 2006, she won the Cinema Award on the National Day of Culture and she produced several movies: ‘Zazowat’ directed by Muhammad Ali al-Aqibi (1992); ‘Crossing’ directed by Mahmoud Bin Mahmoud (1982); ‘The Poisonous’ by Najia Bin Mahmoud; and ‘The Noria Tune’ directed by Abdullatif Bin Ammar.
A strong desire to communicate her art to a larger audience led Bakkar to one day visit the refugees of the Choucha Camp in southern Tunisia, set up by UNHCR and the Tunisian army to accommodate the increasing numbers of refugees fleeing the battlefields during the 2011 Libyan revolution.
A group of religious extremists told her that the refugees did not need films but food, drink, and shelter. It was a defining moment in Bakkar’s life, a moment that set her desire for political action into motion. In October of that year she ran for the National Constituent Assembly and found a spot on the candidate list of the center-left Mouvement Ettajdid, the party that she says it is in line with her political convictions.
Inside the rooms of the National Constituent Assembly, she receives people of all political affiliations, listens to them with an artist’s ear, and raises their concerns as a political expert. Artists know her and now politicians do as well.
Half Human
After her father’s death, Bakkar discovered that she was “a half a human being,” when she learned that as a woman, the state only entitled her to half the inheritance that men receive. Luckily, her family bequeaths the same amount to men and women, which influences her tireless fight to defend women’s rights and sexual freedom.
Bakkar believes that only the state can be the only guarantor of exercising democracy by ensuring freedom of expression and maintaining people’s honour and property through various state agencies.
The political bickering experienced by Tunisians today, she says, is a natural product of the revolution. But she is disturbed by the violence excused by radical parts of the Islamic trend.
Bakkar feels that the revolutionary course was drawn from the beginning on clear bases, but believes it has experienced a serious deviation in recent elections by forming one of the largest governments in the history of Tunisia with 40 ministers. The political transitional course suggests electing a constituent assembly that prepares a constitution and a small government to run the state affairs within a limited period.
Bakkar’s dream is that the revolution reaches a safe harbor through establishing a civil state of democracy that guarantees all freedoms, at the foremost of which is the freedom of innovation. “Politics and life are like the cinema,” she says, “we can choose whatever endings we want.”
