UNDER THE FIG TREES

Inspired by a day spent at work with Fide Fdhili, the woman who would become the star of her film, director Erige Sehiri evokes the sights, smells and sisterly gossip of a team of fruit-pickers who travel each day to an orchard in northern Tunisia. An immersive fiction that borrows heavily from fact, the film follows the women through the orchards, observing their delicate work with the fragile fruit while seemingly eavesdropping on their conversations, mutual confidences, shared jokes and intermittent bickering. With every furtive glance or stern frown, there is a sense of changing times: older and younger workers, students and housewives all have plenty to say about the future of women in Tunisia. Fide – who, like all the women, plays a version of herself – flirts with their male overseer and is forthright in her defiance of tradition, becoming the subject of gossip and conflict that will bubble into drama before the work day is over.