To join the one he loves in Europe, a Syrian refugee agrees to have a Schengen visa tattooed on his back by a controversial artist. By accepting this pact with the devil, the young man from Raqqa leaves Lebanon but becomes a human commodity. He is a “The man who sold his skin », The eponymous hero of the film directed by Kaouther Ben Hania. A drama inspired by the tale of Faust, nominated for the 2021 Oscar for best international film.
Better known in her country for her documentaries and her films inspired by local news items, the 43-year-old Tunisian director was selected in 2017 at the Cannes Film Festival in the selection In some perspective, for his first feature film Beauty and the Pack. This punchy film recounted the difficult filing of a complaint by a young woman raped by the police.
On the occasion of the release, Wednesday March 31, of The man who sold his skin in Tunisian cinemas still open despite the Covid-19 crisis, the director returns to the themes that inspired her.
Your first feature film and your documentaries focused on Tunisian societal issues. Why did you choose the issue of the war in Syria and the refugees for this new film?
Kaouther Ben Hania. I am from Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, where the Arab revolutions broke out ten years ago. This wave has spread to Syria and we share a common destiny, beyond nationalities. This Syrian character imposed itself on me. I happened to be in France when thousands of refugees from the Levant were trying to come to Europe. I wanted to experiment with something else, even though I got the impression, when we were looking for funding for the film, that people expected me to go only to films about Tunisia because of who I am. a Tunisian director.
In Beauty and the Pack, you were describing the story of a rape through very realistic sequence shots. In The man who sold his skin, the pace is quite slow, neat. Why this change of style?
There are directors who have their own style; for me, it’s the story that suggests its form to the film. The Challat of Tunis [sorti en 2015] spoke of an urban legend, that of a man on a motorbike who scarred the buttocks of women. I chose the parody documentary to stage this investigation. It was very different with Beauty and the Pack, since the film told of a Stations of the Cross. Hence the sequence shots that accompany the heroine.
In the case of The man who sold his skin, there is at the center of the film this naked body, exposed. I worked on the representation of the male body in cinema, in the world of art and medieval painting. I thought of my film as a contemporary fable which revisits the legend of Faust.
We rarely catch a glimpse of the reality of the war in Syria in the film. Do you have the feeling that the violence of this conflict, much publicized at the beginning of the war, is difficult to represent?
Images of war have circulated a lot in the media, but I am not interested in graphic violence. Moreover, in Beauty and the Pack, the rape scene is filmed in an elliptical fashion. I prefer to explore symbolic violence, that of power, money, power struggles, less visible and less spectacular but interesting for the narrative.
The film is inspired by the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye and denounces capitalism and dehumanization through art, while addressing the issue of borders. How do these different themes resonate with you?
I was indeed inspired by the work of Wim Delvoye who himself tattooed a man to make a work of art. But the idea of the Schengen visa tattooed on the refugee’s back had to do with the themes that currently obsess me. I’m talking about real life: the administrative difficulties surrounding the visa is something that infuriates me.
By accepting this Faustian pact, Sam, the main character of the film, becomes a commodity. But he does it for love …
Yes. There are several times in the film: we go from tragedy to comedy, with dark humor. It had to stay consistent. The love story makes sense at first because it links youth to impulsiveness, passion, romanticism. But love also allows Sam to regain some form of dignity, self-esteem, and even freedom later. These feelings run through the whole movie.
When you announced the official selection of your film for the Oscars, you said you wanted your country to support Tunisian production more. Why ?
I think we must capitalize on the success of Tunisian films internationally and I am not the only one to say it. We agree among Tunisian filmmakers that everything that governs film production in Tunisia is quite archaic. The support as well as the subsidies are insufficient.