El Hara

One of the joys of attending Mountainfilm is the opportunity to be transported to foreign lands and cultures that most of us are unlikely to ever know in person. In the case of El Hara, the journey is not just geographical and cultural but temporal, too. The film takes us back in time to the Jewish ghetto in Tunis, the Hara, where the writer and intellectual Albert Memmi, now a nonagenarian, lived as a child. It is a world that Memmi describes as a “tissue of lies and hatred,” in which he and his ghetto community were alienated from both the French colonizers and the colonized majority Muslim Tunisians. Like a fortress, the doors and walls, the alleys, the sounds and smells of the Hara embraced and protected its residents. And, like a prison, it kept them locked up in their unalterable differentness.