Hend Sabri has signed with Netflix for a dramedy she will produce herself, while Dhafer El Abidine takes one of the lead roles in the series “The Eddy”. Two pieces of news in the same spring of 2020, and one message: Tunisian cinema is travelling further than ever.
Hend Sabri, executive producer at Netflix
“I’m very happy to announce that I’m joining the Netflix family to create a new show centered around women. I’m also very excited because this will be my first experience as an executive producer.” That was the announcement made on social media by Hend Sabri, star of both Tunisian and Egyptian cinema, in Arabic and in English.
The Tunisian actress joins the American giant with a new dramedy built around Arab women, due in 2021. Her popularity has never wavered: her films fill cinemas, and she has taken prize after prize at festivals as prestigious as the Carthage Film Days and El Gouna — part of the growing international reach of Tunisian cinema. Named a WFP (World Food Programme) Goodwill Ambassador against hunger by the UN in 2010, she is now partnering with Netflix — a name born from squeezing together “Internet” and “flix”, the casual word for films — on a project that promises to be interesting on more than one count.
Dhafer El Abidine, one of the faces of “The Eddy”
Dhafer El Abidine, another well-known Tunisian actor, plays Sami Ben Milad in “The Eddy”, a series that pays tribute to jazz, co-directed by Damien Chazelle, who won an Oscar for “La La Land” and made his name with “Whiplash”. Now streaming on Netflix, it follows the owner of a Parisian jazz club caught up with dangerous criminals as he tries to protect his business, his band and his 16-year-old daughter. The band in “The Eddy” is led by the American producer Glen Ballard, whose credits include Michael Jackson, Alanis Morissette, Elton John and Céline Dion.
In demand abroad
French cinema’s most glamorous couple, Tahar Rahim and Leïla Bekhti, are also in the cast — a reminder of how much Tunisian and French cinema have always fed each other, as the career of Claudia Cardinale showed. The trend gains ground by the day: Tunisian and Arab artists are increasingly in demand abroad, like the icons who light up the great international film events.
