`Boy Of The Terraces' Fights Arab Stereotypes

The minute that Tunisian film director Ferid Boughedir walks into a room, the atmosphere brightens with his energy.

He speaks a fluent, lightly accented English that he learned from watching American films with French subtitles. He learned Italian the same way, he says. It soon becomes apparent that, in terms of film at least, the former movie critic and documentary-maker is a one-man cultural-exchange program linking his native Tunisia, Arab North Africa, black Africa and Europe.

Little wonder, then, that when he visited Seattle to promote his first feature movie, "Halfaouine, Boy of the Terraces," Boughedir had something to say about everything.

"Halfaouine," which opens Friday at the Varsity for a four-day run, is a coming-of-age tale of a different sort. The mother of the young hero Noura is about to put an end to his favorite pastime: accompanying her to the local Turkish bath where she and all her friends relax in the altogether, and gossip.

The film is half-autobiographical, Boughedir says. At the Turkish bath in his Tunis neighborhood of Halfaouine, he saw friends thrown out "like Adam chased from paradise," and as an adult, he reflected that the experience must be a shock, "like a second birth. The Turkish bath itself is like a mother's belly - dark, warm, full of liquids."

Boughedir put off his own moment of expulsion as long as possible.

"You notice I'm very short," he says. "I went (to the baths) until I was 13, which was very rare. My mother would say, `He's just 7 years old, but too tall.' I was trying to be as innocent as possible, to stay longer."

In a number of ways, the making of the film was a family affair. The director's nephew, Selim Boughedir, plays Noura, and the shooting was done in the director's old neighborhood.

Most of his Turkish-bath women were not professional actresses but neighborhood friends who knew Boughedir and trusted him.

"I didn't cheat," he says. "I explained to them what it was about, that there was no rape, no sexual act, that it was just about a mother taking her child to the baths. They said, `Oh, is that all? Well, there's no problem with that.' "

Boughedir was determined to make a film that was lyrical rather than titillating.

"A child can see poetry where adults only see banal daily life. When you're a child, this is magic - to see huge women. Even when they're really fat, they're at ease with their bodies. They walk like queens."

Though there were worries about censorship, the film played in Tunisian theaters uncut, with no age restriction on who could see it. It went on to great commercial success in Tunisia - "bigger than `Rocky,' than `Rambo,' " Boughedir says - and became, along with Nouri Bouzid's "Man of Ashes," part of an Arab "new wave" that rebels against what Boughedir describes as "low entertainment cinema: belly-dance films, melodrama."

Boughedir's storytelling instinct is a family trait. His grandfather was a bookseller who turned to professional storytelling when his business colleague swindled him. Boughedir's father is a journalist, playwright and short-story writer.

"In the generation of my grandfather, it was oral. With my father, it was the pen. For me, it's the image."

In making the film, Boughedir wanted to combat the Western stereotype of Arabs as "passionate, violent, fanatic."

"If you're outside the society," he comments, "it looks very puritanical, very rigid. But if you go inside, it's a very sensuous society, with humor." He was especially eager to capture the sometimes bawdy flavor of women keeping each other company as they live life behind the veil.

Other than that, he says, the film has "no message, no lesson. I was just trying to catch the richness and diversity of the culture. There's a saying: If you respect your neighbor's difference, you will live in peace.

"I would go further and say that if you see the richness inside the difference in your neighbor, you may not just live in peace but enrich yourself."