A Son

Tunisia, summer 2011. Fares, Meriem and their ten-year-old son Aziz drive south for a holiday. On the road their car runs into an ambush and the boy is shot. At the hospital they are told he needs a liver transplant, and the parents are tested first as donors. When the blood typing comes back, it emerges that Fares is not his father. While the boy lies in intensive care, something else opens up between husband and wife. The film carries both at once: a child's life and the end of a marriage. Mehdi M. Barsaoui's first film; ninety-six minutes, with Sami Bouajila as Fares and Najla Ben Abdallah as Meriem. Bouajila won best actor in the Horizons section at Venice for it, and then the César in France.