Tunisia, Arabic - 95 min
Feature Narrative
TOTAL BUDGET
€485,480
CONFIRMED FINANCING
€192,146
CONTACT
imedmarz@gmail.com
+21698441465
During lockdown, Sarra works from home, helping people in distress during the COVID-19 crisis. Her husband, Kais, is psychotic, and suddenly finds himself without medication. This is when a long and painful descent into hell begins while nature regains its rights.
Kais is locked down with his wife Sarra and their cat Bagheera in an apartment in the northern suburbs of Tunis.
Sarra spends her days teleworking in the humanitarian sector, while Kais, at risk of being fired, tries to make the best out of his days. Between shopping for the house and bringing the grocery basket to his schizophrenic mother, his days are repeated and alike. Kais fears
COVID-19; he protects himself and his family against the virus, and sometimes, he does it a little too much: hydro-alcoholic gels at all costs, compulsive hand washing… The specter of psychosis comes to the fore when Kais’s medicines are sold out due to the sanitary crisis. In order to compensate for the absence of medication, Kais will start smoking cannabis again, which will soon accentuate his psychotic state.
He will then slowly, but surely, turn into a worshiper of COVID-19 under the influence of a New Age pro-conspiracy Facebook page called “We Are the Virus,” which encourages people to spread the virus in order to protect nature.
By all means possible, Kais will try to inoculate himself with the virus and spread it around him, starting by... his wife Sarra. Kais’s delusions will worsen, his hallucinations will multiply; he even gets to see a giant virus floating in the sky.
Then, a slow descent into hell begins, not only for Kais but also for his wife who will see him transform into a New Age subject beginning to worship a new god: COVID-19.
In mid-March, I had a disastrous return from Paris to Tunis, on a plane crowded with people wearing masks. The heat was terrible, and an old woman kept coughing. Paranoia soon took hold of the passengers, slowly but surely. We shut down, avoided each other, and looked away.
How could such a tiny particle turn our lives upside down? It was the weekend of great speeches and big decisions: lockdown, social distancing, and curfews. The world froze, for good it seemed.
I could hardly fathom it, but I locked myself in my house, and the days started to look alike. Boredom and monotony gradually settled in. A neighbor, whose anxiolytics were not available in pharmacies, walked like a zombie in the courtyard of our building. On television, there were dead bodies and tears.
Cinema has been hit hard. We no longer film, we just watch, helpless, forbidden from touching the camera. The urgency is here; the images are here, but we don’t touch them. This virus has taken not only our bodies, but also our memory.
The horror. I quickly reached the point of saturation, and I had to write. I wrote the screenplay in 5 days, thinking deeply of my late psychotic uncle who used to lock himself up whenever he was afraid of harming others. How would he have experienced this forced confinement? What if I called him Kais? And what if he was married to a woman giving her life to humanitarian causes during these troubling times?
Thanks to a hybrid form, the director takes an original and personal look at the global sanitary crisis and its effects on people's psychology; it scrutinizes the lockdown observed and applied in almost all countries, putting us in front of a mirror, and showing us the fragility of the human being. It is through an intimate story that the director offers us to get hold, with full force, of this generalized psychosis.
Communion is a film about seclusion, about feeling that the other poses a danger to us. The main character—who already has psychological problems, and with the lack of his psychotropic drugs—begins to enter a fairly serious phase of psychosis, accentuated by what is happening everywhere.
This film was a real human and technical adventure; a project that was born in this context and also shot in the same period.
We approached CineGouna because it is a program known to accompany rather different films, ones that deviate from the classic models of production.
The film was self-produced following the logic of urgency with rather limited resources, and CineGouna can be useful to us on all levels: finding potential co-producers, international sellers, distributors, and also managing to source financing for the finalization of post-production.
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