2023-05-21 22:04:00
From our correspondent in Tunis,
It was while listening to this song on YouTube in 2011, just after the revolution, that the young director Yassine Redissi wondered about the identity of the singer. A man with a full beard who sings in the streets of Besançon, a Tunisia of yesteryear.
« She described wonderfully well a summer in Tunis in the 1960s, 1970s, it was colorful, it was jovial. He was a character who had a very rich discography on love for Tunisia, on exile, on patriotism, on the difficulty of leaving, etc. »
The director decides to pay tribute via a documentary to this Tunisian Jewish artist, unknown, but who alone embodies the spirit of La Goulette, a district in the northern suburbs of Tunis. A district where Maltese, Livornese, French, Tunisians, Muslims and Jews mixed together before the country’s independence.
Henri Tibi photographed this diversity daily in parallel with his activity as a songwriter. “So these 6 000 archives, we had to digitize them first, then sort them, then choose which ones would be in the film “, explains the director.
Beyond the documentary, Yassine worked with the young singer Slim Ben Ammar on initiatives that aim to perpetuate the memory of the artist, such as this concert organized at the Institut français.
scent of nostalgia
Many young people are present in the audience, galvanized by a nostalgia for a period that they did not know, like Nour Bey, 28 years old and a lawyer. “I can’t give an explanation for this interest in fact, other than a real identity interest or a way of life by proxy and also, through the film, the memories that my parents have of their Jewish childhood friends.she thinks.
For Slim Ben Ammar, the singer, Henri Tibi’s words are still current: “Me, it speaks to me and also to all my comrades who helped me to work on this album, and suddenly, we tried to dust it off. That’s continuity, it’s that a film doesn’t die and music also doesn’t die. »
For lack of an audience after the independence of the country and the departure of many Jews, Henri Tibi had left to end his life in France, singing in Besançon that he would return one day to his native land.
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