Tunisian Selma Baccar challenges the form of documentary film. The country has a solid reputation in film with its Golden Age in the late 1980s and 1990s, but due to censorship and restrictive and divisive official life, Tunisian film-makers usually remain in fictional territory. This chapter focuses on Baccar's first and most important feature-length film Fatma 75: a feminist essay film about women's roles in Tunisia throughout history. She has since also made Habiba M'Sika, a biopic of a Jewish singer who was immensely popular in the 1930s in Tunis, and Khochkhach, part biography, part fictional retelling of the life and times of Baccar's aunts. Between the main women film-makers in the country such as Moufida Tlatli, Nejia Ben Mabrouk and Raja Amari, Baccar was the first, and she remains the only one, experimenting with aspects of the non-fiction form. In her films she deals with extraordinary women whose voices are dominant and self-assured, as their looks and intersubjective relationship with the film-maker and spectator establish a feminist complicity and solidarity.

Tunisia, known as the land of fictions, has struggled with serious censorship issues. Post-colonial cinema in Tunisia is known throughout the world for popular films like Férid Boughédir's Halfaouine, Nouri Bouzid's Bezness, and Moufida Tlatli's Les Silences du Palais from the so-called Golden Age in the 1990s. It has become known as a cinema that deals with women's sensuality and the magic and beauty of the old Tunis: palaces and labyrinthine medinas feature prominently as settings that determine the plot lines. In many historians’ eyes, such as Hedi Khelil and Férid Boughédir, Tunisian cinema is a cinema of the mythical feminine. Khelil calls Tunisian cinema ‘le cinéma au féminin’. Nevertheless, there is a much more problematic gendered spatiality going on in Tunisian cinema than most commentators care to illustrate. The identity politics in Golden Age films foreground women as the bearers of the nation's troubles, while Tunisia's liberal and democratic status in the Arab world denies even the existence of any troubles. Boughédir acknowledges that ‘the image of the family is at the heart of Tunisian cinema: the family is often the microcosm that represents the nation, and the generations that live together are therefore the representation of the schism between tradition and modernity’ (Gabous, 1998: 174).