Feature Narrative Film
TOTAL BUDGET
US $950,000
CONFIRMED FINANCING
US $285,000
CONTACT
daoud.anissa@gmail.com
+21623267982
+33615670390
Two teenage shepherds are attacked on a mountain by jihadists, who decapitate the elder one and force the younger one to return the head as a macabre message to the family. Inspired by real events, the film tells of a boy's journey.
Two young shepherds, 16 year-old Nizar and his 14-year-old cousin Achraf, are grazing their goats on a meadow high in a poor and mountainous region of Center-West Tunisia. This mountain has become a militarized zone, forbidden to civilians since it became a hideout for jihadist groups.
The two boys secretly climb up without taking their dogs. As they spend a joyful moment in the splendid nature, a group of men attack them with extreme violence, accusing Nizar of being an army informant. Achraf loses consciousness, while his cousin is tied up.
When Achraf wakes up, he sees Nizar's body lying inanimately beside him, as one of the terrorists kicks a round mass towards him, ordering him to take it back to their family. Achraf discovers, with horror, that it is the severed head of his cousin. After some hesitation, full of pain and fear, Achraf finally rolls the severed head in a bag and puts it on his back.
Achraf will begin a painful journey during which he will have to summon all the tools of imagination and innocence, in order to find the courage to carry out his horrifying duty to the end, but above all, to survive. Throughout this unbearable task, he will find help from Rahma, his 13-year-old cousin, who is driven by a uniquely personal life force and stubbornness.
Inspired by real events, the film tells the initiatory journey of a boy by diving in the universe of childhood and its incredible ability to overcome violence and trauma.
In November 2015, an entire country—just like myself—woke up shocked and overwhelmed by the brutal murder of Mabrouk Soltani, and the double tragedy experienced by his cousin. I became obsessed with this almost mythological story and with the question: "What can happen in the mind of a child while travelling ten kilometers with his cousin's head in his bag?"
Despite a bloody opening, the film never wallows in it, but focuses instead on the essence of what concerns me: observing the changes within Achraf. I want to follow his path, with a camera that will alternately be hyper-realistic and almost anthropological, then epic and mystical with a nearly supernatural feel, when it comes to filming this child in dialogue with a nature full of spiritual charge.
Rooted in reality, raw and radical, the film is punctuated by Achraf's mental submersions, which I want to treat without frills of special effects or strange music, but with the same harshness as the rest of the reality that surrounds the child. Severed Head is, above all, the story of a struggle for survival, and a reflection on violence as much as on childhood. For this purpose, it allows itself to freely invent poetic escapes, just as childhood allows itself to experience the world by inventing it.
Severed Head is a project within the framework of a long-term collaboration between the producers of the Tunisian company APA and La Luna Productions. The APA first entrusted the distribution of their short films to La Luna Productions, then the two companies coproduced the short film Law of the Lamb, also directed by Lotfi Achour.
This partnership expanded when Lotfi Achour's filmography, the mastery of his cinema and his exigency convinced the producer of Maje Production to join this co-production around the project Severed Head.
This collaboration is also based on a fundamental importance given by all of us to the script.
The narrative and the film proposal are highly engaging, because it disturbs by its violence and echoes with a harsh reality. We were particularly interested in the choice of the narrative point of view. The violence and trauma are narrated through a story that occasionally creates confusion between reality and Achraf's imagination, a mechanism of self-preservation we feel with emotion, without complacency. The narrative also questions the consequences of such a barbaric act for these men, women and children, and its repercussions. And of course, the geopolitical dimension of this story strikes, at every moment, through the images evoked—the brutality of this abandonment, the alienation of these populations in touch with a disconcerting reality, isolation, remoteness, the absence of authorities, the harshness of the place; they all contribute to reinforce the grip of the strongest on the weakest.
APA Production
2017: Burning Hope
2016: Law of the Lamb, All the Rest Is the Work of Man
2014: Father, Laisse-moi finir
La Luna Productions
2007: Manon on the Asphalt
Maje Productions
2018: American Dharma
2017: Chien
2015: Braqueurs, Asphalte
2014: Still Alice, Cold in July