Harka: ‘Who was this man who became the symbol of the Arab Spring? That was my entry point’

On the morning of December 17th, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a struggling Tunisian living in the impoverished city of Sidi Bouzid, was selling fruit without a permit when a municipal inspector took away his goods and electronic scale. The desperate man, who had been taking care of his six sisters since childhood, went to the police to demand the return of his scale but was refused. He then asked to meet the governor but was also turned down. Later that morning, at around 11.30am, the 26-year-old set himself on fire outside the governor’s office. His scrabbling life and terrible death would ignite the Arab Spring in Tunisia and beyond.

These fateful events and their unexpectedly disappointing aftermath have been a focal point for the award-winning documentarian Lotfy Nathan, who began spending time in Sidi Bouzid 2015. He soon encountered post-revolution frustrations: unemployment remained high; grinding poverty was everywhere; many north Africans risked death to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. Harka, Nathan’s long-gestating film, is poignantly titled: the word can refer to those who migrate illegally across the Mediterranean by boat; it can also mean to burn.

“Mohamed Bouazizi was a young man with plans to leave the country until something happened to keep him there and he went into decline,” Nathan says. “The initial idea was a biographical feature. Who was this man who became the symbol of the Arab Spring? That was my entry point. I started visiting Tunisia. But the film took a while to make, and over the course of my research, and the development of the film, there’s a growing hindsight in the aftermath of the revolution. It didn’t make sense to do a revolution story. The aim became a contemporary portrait of a character who is representative of the same conditions that affected Mohamed Bouazizi. And the character ended up being an amalgamation of people I met. I was interested in a character study more than politics. I was trying to find people like him.”

Harka takes place more than a decade after Bouazizi’s death and his country’s subsequent Jasmine Revolution. The French actor Adam Bessa gives an extraordinary, Cannes-winning performance as Ali, an unlicensed gasoline-seller squatting at a construction site and saving up to pay a smuggler to get him in Europe. This small ambition is squashed when Ali’s father dies of cancer. His older brother Skander (Khaled Brahem) has found work as a waiter in the tourist resort of Hammamet, leaving Ali to care for his younger sisters, Sarra (Ikbal Harbi) and Alyssa (Salima Maatoug). Sarra has left school to take a job as a cleaner, but the arrangement puts increasing financial demands on Ali, who takes greater risks with illicit gasoline deliveries.

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Ali’s unravelling is narrated by Alyssa, his youngest sibling, who is still at school. The Terrence Malick-style voiceover adds further post-classical Hollywood texture to a film that looks like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western and feels like a companion piece to such tortured character studies as Five Easy Pieces and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – a favourite of Lotfy Nathan.

“We had versions of the film that didn’t have narration, because we worried it would be super heavy-handed,” the writer-director says. “The film, ultimately, is my first movie. So I decided to not be so precious with it. I did some things that maybe weren’t so safe with the storytelling, like music and the voiceover. I just followed my instincts. And, yeah, I love Terrence Malick’s Badlands and Days of Heaven. Those narrations are really classic.

“I also looked at an amazing film called The Killing Floor, by Bill Duke. That showed me how narration is really underrated. And it was important to offset Ali’s character, which is all bravado and aggression. I was so taken with Salima Maatoug, who plays Alyssa. She had such a presence on set just while watching us filming. That’s when I realised that she could narrate the film even though she doesn’t speak a lot, and she could tell the story in retrospect.”

Nathan first came to prominence with 12 O’Clock Boys, an electrifying portrait of Pug, a lively teen who aspires to get in with a group of dirt-bike riders in Baltimore. The 2013 documentary, which was ecstatically received at SXSW, Sundance and the Viennale, saw Nathan named an HBO emerging artist; he also won over the city’s most distinguished resident. “I got a phone call from John Waters,” Nathan says. “He had seen the film and really liked it, and it was so nice to hear from him.

“But he warned me: I think you might get sued. Because that is how it works with a lot of real people. We made a documentary that got a lot of attention. And, you know, it is a kind of exploitation when you make a documentary film about a subject and return to your own life afterwards. So I am getting sued,” Nathan says, referring to complaints about his use of footage from earlier films about the bikers. “It’s one of the perks of the job, I guess.”

Nathan was born in the UK to Egyptian parents. Aged 10, he moved to the US with his mother. Being an outsider has helped shape him and his films, including Harka. “We cast local people and non-professionals in the movie,” he says. “It’s a story from an outsider’s perspective. I don’t think that’s impossible. I think the conversation about representation in film is important. But I don’t agree with the idea that you need to be part of the community or culture that you’re telling a story about. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to make a better film or more honest film.”

Harka is in cinemas from May 5th