CHENNAI : Meryam Joobeur’s Who Do I Belong To begins on an idyllic note of domestic bliss, harmony and happiness: a family in Northern Tunisia playfully gets ready for a wedding. Aicha (Salha Nasraoui) lovingly gives her husband Brahim (Mohamed Hassine Grayaa) a shave while coaxing her youngest son Adam (Rayen Mechergui) to dry his wet hair, lest he falls ill. Slowly, things begin taking an ominous turn, leading up to the catastrophic moment of realisation that their sons Mehdi (Malek Mechergui) and Amine (Chaker Mechergui) are gone and won’t ever come back. It takes time for Aicha to face up to the painful fact that they have been brainwashed to go off and fight for the Islamic State (ISIS).
The film maps out the repercussions of their decision, how it doesn’t just alter Mehdi and Amine’s lives but turns the world upside down for their loved ones, family, friends and community. The Arabic language film had its world premiere in the competition section of Berlinale 2024. Joobeur structures Who Do I Belong To into three chapters—The Aftermath, Shadow Emerges, and Awakening. The first segment is about Aicha and Brahim’s anguish and anxiety. What could have gone wrong despite them being dedicated to bringing up their sons right? It’s a blind wall that they seem to be facing with no knowledge of the whereabouts of their sons. Aicha wants to get past the uncertainty and know if they’ll be back at all or not. At least she can mourn if she gets to know of their deaths. Brahim thinks their safe return would also be meaningless because they’d have to anyhow land in prison. Both keep the truth hidden from the youngest son, who finds a surrogate brother in the local cop Bilal (Adam Bessa).
While basing her film in the purported radicalisation of the young by ISIS, their training in slayings, beheadings and bombings, the director focuses on the human dimension—the dilemmas of the family members and the contradictory emotional pulls they are plagued with. In that sense, the film picks up the same threads as Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters, which was about four daughters who leave Tunisia to join ISIS in Libya. The difference lies in the narrative approaches and cinematic styles of their makers. Hania used the hybrid form, the mix of documentary and fiction filmmaking, to great effect. Joobeur crafts her own distinct visual language to evoke the horrors the film deals with.
Who Do I Belong To pivots on the mood and atmospherics. The eerie, haunting, surreal images drawn from Aicha’s prophetic nightmares and the extreme, sombre closeups of her actors’ freckled faces come together to assuredly construct the tragic reality. However, the film does get too self-aware, stretched and plodding at times.
Things come to a head when Mehdi returns home a few months later, without Amine but with a pregnant and mysterious Syrian wife named Reem (Dea Liane). All you see of her from behind the niqab are the eyes and she barely ever utters a word. While Brahim finds her silence unsettling and wants her to leave, Aicha welcomes her home because she is after all their son Mehdi’s wife. She vows to protect them as long as she is alive, is happy making warm meals for Mehdi and trimming his beard. However, as strange disappearances begin to mark his return, Aicha soon finds her unconditional maternal love clashing with her commitment for the larger community. In a sense, it’s like the Indian classic, Mother India’s central conflict finding a new fertile ground in contemporary geopolitics in Tunisia. We know the categorical choice that Nargis made as the lead in the 1957 film. How will Aicha square off with the tangles of politics of violence in contemporary times? The answer is not easy, and the resolution is tough to negotiate, but what’s the most difficult is to be able to understand the complexity of a mother’s heart.
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Film: Who Do I Belong To