As I sat down to talk to Baya Medhaffar, who plays the main character in Leyla Bouzid’s As I Open My Eyes, I felt strange. There are a lot of young people producing good art. However, actually meeting and interviewing someone barely a year older than me who has already achieved distinction in the cinematic world and is at the beginning of what I'm sure will be an auspicious career was not just inspiring, but unsettling too.

In As I Open My Eyes, Baya plays Farah, a talented and confident teenager, the lead singer of a small band whose music often touches on political themes. Under the oppressive regime of Ben Ali, Tunisia’s former dictator, this sort of artistic endeavour was heavily punished. Centred on Farah and her multiple identities of artist, woman and daughter, the film explores her relationship with her art and the people around her.

When I ask her about her first experiences of film in a country with an extremely low number of cinemas, Baya stresses the importance of her family and their artistic background: “As I grew up in an artistic family, I had the opportunity. When I was young, my mother would take me to the cinema and she would explain to me the whole movie during the whole screening. It was annoying for other people who were watching because I was five years old and I wasn’t supposed to understand everything, especially when it wasn’t a movie for children. I think that’s when it started.”

Bouzid and Medhaffar are not alone in attempting to jump-start Tunisian cinema. As an inspiration for this recent revival, Baya cites political circumstances and people’s will to have a say on how Tunisia’s future will unfold.  “It’s because politics sucks that these people have this strength to express themselves”, she says.

“It’s because politics sucks that these people have this strength to express themselves”

When it comes to the treatment of women in Tunisia, the film adopts a critical and, sometimes, satirical attitude. This makes me wonder whether that caused controversy when the film was screened there and what the reactions that Baya received were. She replies that “I had a lot of messages from people telling me how courageous I am and I didn’t even reply to them” because “they weren’t talking to me, they were talking to the character and they would have been disappointed because I don’t have her strength and courage. But I didn’t have any insults. We had normal reactions.”

Interestingly, she thinks that these gender issues are not central to the film’s main message and does not view the treatment of women as worse in Tunisia than in European countries like France, where she is currently studying. “I feel the same when I walk on the streets in Tunisia or in Paris”, she states.

“I had a lot of messages from people telling me how courageous I am and I didn’t even reply to them”

The film was received well by audiences not only in Tunisia, but in all the countries it was screened. Baya explains this by saying that “[the film] is universal because there is the love story, there is the relationship between the mother and the daughter, and even though it happens in a political context, there is not a lot of insistence on this political context, and you can blend it into any political context you want.”

Baya’s apparent resemblance to Farah struck many audiences. They are both young talented artists, deeply conscious of their national identity, and also share a sense of duty to express this national identity through their art. Baya stresses that she sees herself as more mature than the character she plays but she does acknowledge that “one of the most difficult things was to play someone who is very close to me but who is not me.”

The film features a very striking interrogation scene and I wonder how Baya dealt with it. “It was very intense,” she says. “I stopped the shooting in one of the takes because I couldn’t continue. It’s funny because the guy who plays the interrogator is the first assistant of the movie so he was there during the whole shooting. He’s very kind and, for this scene, he shaved his beard, he put on make-up, I couldn’t even recognise him! When I saw him I was scared. And then they brought this fat guy with these huge arms and he told me ‘Hello’. Actually he was a very good friend of the first assistant and the first assistant told him ‘We have to scare her.’ And it worked!”

Review: As I Open My Eyes

As Baya starts rolling her cigarette, I realise my time is over. I have not been persuaded that gender issues are not one of the focal points of the film, and I am still very surprised by her comments about living in Paris as a woman. At the same time, however, I am fascinated. Her dynamic personality, her confidence and her original outlook on Western culture are compelling and I can only hope she continues to offer this outlook throughout her future career