‘Four Daughters’ Producer Habib Attia Talks Upcoming Projects & Challenges: “Tunisia’s Post-Revolution New Wave Has Matured”
10.03.2024 - 14:49
/ deadline.com
Kaouther Ben Hania will history for her native Tunisia on Sunday with its first Academy Award if her nominated work Four Daughters triumphs in the Best Documentary category on Sunday.
The director belongs to a generation of Tunisian filmmakers who emerged in the wake of their country’s so-called Jasmine Revolution, which ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in early 2011.
Habib Attia, who is one of the original producers on Four Daughters, has been an integral part of this movement too.
The Tunis-based producer has cinema in his blood as the son of late producer Ahmed Bahaeddine Attia, whose credits included Moufida Tlatli’s 1994 breakout The Silences of the Palace, starring Tunisian-Egyptian star Hend Sabry in her first major big screen role.
On finishing his high school studies, Attia headed to his mother’s native Italy to study engineering in Milan, rather than immediately following in his father’s footsteps.
“I was going to be an engineer,” recounts Attia, a fluent Arabic, French, Italian and English speaker.
He eventually returned to Tunisia in 2007 to take up the reins of his father’s company Cinétéléfilms, following his early death.
Attia has kept the banner alive with a steady flow of award-winning local films, including a number of works reflecting the revolutionary period such as Hinde Boujemaa’s single mother drama It Was Better Tomorrow; Murad Ben Cheikh’s documentary No More Fear, capturing the protests and exploring their legacy, and Sam Tlili’s Cursed Be The Phosphate, exploring an early 2008 social disobedience movement against Ben Ali in the mining city of Redeyef.
More recent credits, alongside the films of Ben Hania, include Meryam Joobeur’s 2018 Oscar-nominated short Brotherhood, and Mehdi