Tender is The Wolf

Tunisia, 2006, 83 min, Feature

Directed by: Jilani Saadi
Starring: Anissa Daoud, Mohammad Graya, Atef Ben Hesin
Language: Arabic with English/ subtitlesp

Festivals & Awards: was screened in competition at the 2006 Dubai Film Festival.

Tender Is the Wolf is a sensitive but bleak drama which shows the tumultuous consequences of a crime committed by the group of outcasts a Tunisian man hangs out with. Unemployed and directionless, the gentle, lumbering Stoufa meets up with his three pals on a corner one cold winter night in Tunis to drink and hang out. It is there that they encounter Salousa, a willful, talkative young prostitute they know. Conversation leads to confrontation, and the friends impulsively gang rape the woman as she hopelessly tries to stop the assault. The next day the woman enlists her thuggish brother to track down her attackers and deal with them. Stoufa, though not having participated, is nonetheless violently beaten. Yet, with something still troubling him, he meets with the woman and a tentative, unusual relationship develops between them. This dark, unsettling urban drama eschews the sunny, rural locales and more upbeat storytelling typical of Arabian cinema to explore a cold urban world of poverty and violence.

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