Unlike the overtly political cinema of Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina (Algeria) or the melancholic exile of Nabil Ayouch (Morocco), Halfaouine roots its decolonial discourse in the micro-geography of a Tunis working-class neighborhood. Released just three years after the 1987 “Change of Power” (when Ben Ali ousted Bourguiba), the film consciously retreats from state-sponsored nationalism to reclaim the sensory, haptic realities of pre-revolutionary daily life. This paper explores how the film’s three distinct spatial regimes—the street (male/public), the hammam (female/wet/private), and the terrace (liminal/overhead)—construct and deconstruct patriarchal masculinity.
Analyzing the film’s use of diegetic sound—the muezzin’s call overlapping with neighborhood gossip, the derbouka drums signaling weddings, the whisper networks of women—this section posits that Halfaouine is a film about listening more than seeing. Noura’s crisis is auditory: he cannot unhear the adult secrets transmitted across the terrace walls. The paper concludes that Boughedir equates social modernity not with new buildings, but with a new tolerance for acoustic transgression.
The Gaze, the Threshold, and the Revolution: Negotiating Masculinity and Space in Férid Boughedir’s Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces (1990) mshahdt fylm Halfaouine Boy of the Terraces 1990 mtrjm
This paper examines Férid Boughedir’s Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces (1990) as a seminal work of post-independence Tunisian cinema that eschews overt political allegory in favor of an intimate, ethnographic exploration of male adolescence. Through the spatial dialectic of the public street, the female-dominated bathhouse, and the forbidden rooftop terraces, the film charts protagonist Noura’s transition from childhood to adult masculinity. We argue that Boughedir uses the boy’s voyeuristic gaze not merely as a coming-of-age trope, but as a complex metaphor for Tunisia’s own precarious negotiation between traditional Arabo-Islamic privacy, French colonial architectural legacies, and a burgeoning, post-revolutionary national identity.
The celebrated bathhouse sequence is not merely exotic spectacle. Boughedir frames the hammam as the last bastion of pre-colonial female autonomy. For Noura, it is a space of tactile wonder and auditory overload—the slap of kisra dough, the chants, the steam. Critically, the camera adopts Noura’s at-first ungendered, pre-Oedipal gaze. When he begins to notice the mature female body (specifically Latifa’s buttocks), the hammam transforms from womb to prison. His expulsion signifies the violent severance from maternal space, a necessary trauma for entry into the “republic of brothers” on the street. The Gaze, the Threshold, and the Revolution: Negotiating
The alleyways of Halfaouine constitute a performative arena where young Noura fails spectacularly. The paper analyzes the circumcision scene and the subsequent “test of pain” as rituals of failed interpellation. Unlike the confident Rashid of Egyptian neo-realism, Noura is clumsy, weepy, and attracted to the erotic baraka (blessing/energy) of female singers. The street’s code—loud, aggressive, homosocial—alienates him. Boughedir thus critiques Bourguiba’s modernist project of “liberating” women while hardening men; Noura’s discomfort suggests that Tunisian masculinity remains a schizophrenic construct.
The titular terraces ( sath ) are the film’s most original contribution to spatial theory in cinema. Neither fully public nor private, the rooftops allow Noura to peep through grilles at women bathing—a classic Moorish cinematic trope. However, this paper reads the terrace as a meta-cinematic apparatus. Noura becomes a director of sorts, framing shots of forbidden life. The climactic moment when he attempts to descend from the terrace into the female courtyard (to touch the naked bride) results in a literal fall. We argue this fall allegorizes the failure of the post-independence generation: they desire the modernity (the visible woman) but lack the architecture (social structures) to access it without destroying the traditional home. Keywords: Tunisian cinema
Criterion Collection / Artificial Eye (UK) / Tunisian Ministry of Culture print.
[Your Name] Course/Journal: Postcolonial Cinema & the Maghreb
Halfaouine resists the cliché of the nostalgic “native informant.” Instead, it diagnoses a specific postcolonial pathology: the generation born just after independence, trapped between the mother’s wet, communal hammam and the father’s dry, failed street politics. Noura remains suspended on the terrace—a voyeur who cannot act. This, Boughedir suggests, is the honest portrait of Tunisia in 1990: a nation of brilliant spectators waiting for the courage to fall into the courtyard. Keywords: Tunisian cinema; Férid Boughedir; postcolonial masculinity; hammam; spatial semiotics; Halfaouine .