El Gort

• October 31, 2013
• Article

Best Director from the Arab World/Documentary Competition- Hamza Ouni relates a story of a camel that will be put to work in a mill. The camel is taken down very young into the barrouta , an enclosed circular space with a small entrance with a well at its center. The camel is tied up to a piece of wood connected to the well and its mission is to turn around the well, being blindfolded, in order to extract the water. It spends years going around and around until it has grown bigger, older, tired and incapable of working. The door it entered from is too small to get out of now. The camel that was brought in alive comes out in small pieces following its slaughter and will be replaced.

Those in the small town of Mhammedia who toil in bleak agricultural jobs believe they are like the camel in their suffering. Hamza Ouni's film plunges us into this world of the garrata , the workers on the hay trucks crisscrossing Tunisia, that have been endlessly roaming in search for a livelihood since the beginning of the last century to this day. Anyone who works in this field is named garrat derived from the word gort which means hay in Arabic. The garrata are a tough people who live in a kind of purgatory and are cut off from any chance at a decent life. This film chronicles the lives of people searching for a livelihood who are ready to do anything to earn it. It is an examination of daily life in the heart of Mhammedia and the promise of exile that lies beyond.

 Mohammad Khawaja