Cinema Nights: Behind the Mountains

“Beyond the Mountain” directed by Mohamed Ben Attia: Between fantasy and adventure, a message of liberation from the constraints of reality.

Rafik is a desperate man. Released from a Tunisian prison, where he served four years for smashing up the office where he used to work, he is now convinced he can fly and is determined, in the face of his family skepticism, to prove to his young son Yassine that his vision is real. Taking the boy out of school and heading to the mountains, where he finds temporary refuge by invading a bourgeois family’s country house, Rafik is mentally unwell. Whether he can fly or not remains an open question, however, cleverly teased by the filmmaker and by Majd Mastoura, who is both as persuasive and dignified as Rafik.