Tunisian filmmaker Nouri Bouzid's Making Of chronicles a young man's drift into fundamentalist violence. Twentysomething Bahta (Lotfi Abdelli)—an uneducated, unemployed slacker whose only genuine interest is breakdancing—is antagonized by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and despairs of any chance of immigration thanks to anti-Arab sentiment in the post-9/11 world. When a stupid prank involving Bahta's impersonation of a police officer backfires, he winds up being sheltered by the head of a fundamentalist cell (Lotfi Dziri), who begins to indoctrinate him into Islamic extremism. As a chronic malcontent and eternal misfit, Bahta's absorption into the terrorist sphere has little to do with politics or theology, and he ultimately proves to be too unreliable and volatile for the cause. The film is weakened somewhat by being set in the stable and (by Arab standards) moderate Tunisian society, as opposed to war-torn Iraq or the West Bank, but Abdelli's performance as the tightly-wound and self-destructive Bahta is a masterwork of visceral intensity—he won the Best Actor Award at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, where the film's screenplay was also honored. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include a brief intro by Tribeca Film Festival artistic director Peter Scarlet, and an insightful interview with Bouzid and Abdelli. Bottom line: a small but solid extras package for a thought-provoking film.] (P. Hall)
Making Of
Koch Lorber, 115 min., in Arabic w/English subtitles, not rated, DVD: $26.98 Volume 23, Issue 5
Making Of
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