Short Documentary, 13 minutes, color
Producer/Director/Camera: Amie Williams
“Like many young people today, I have a dream: I want the world to change. But nothing will change if information does not, if the truth does not, All the dictators of the world fear the net, because the first thing they always do, is to control the information” – Lina Ben Mhenni
Ten years on since the Arab Spring, Tunisian Girl, Ten Year’s On looks at the legacy of Lina Ben Mhenni (aka Tunisian Girl) and her extraordinary journey as a firebrand cyber activist and courageous citizen journalist. Lina succumbed to Lupus at the young age of 34, an illness she had been fighting throughout her youth, and died in January, 2020. What was Lina’s dream, what did she achieve during her lifetime, and who are the women and young activists who are continuing her struggle?
In the last years, women’s voices in the Middle East especially during the street protests and revolutions from Sudan, to Beirut to Iraq have risen significantly and in an unprecedented and exponential way. This started with women such as Lina, but continued and grew as a reaction to a number of things, not least of which was the rise of Isis and extremism, which meant that women wanted to fight back. These women were not fighting against men per se, but against the forces of ‘going backwards’ and were in the same trenches as many men who supported them and fought alongside them for a future built on modern and egalitarian ideas for both men and women.
The film tells the story of Lina’s vision for human rights and freedom of speech in Tunisia, a freedom which is at the root of every other freedom–the freedom to use words and tell the truth without being imprisoned, tortured or murdered. We are currently looking to expand the short into a feature. We want to use footage filmed of Lina between the years 2015-2016, as well as new interviews with her father, Sadok and her boyfriend Haytham, as well as some of the bloggers and activists who worked with her and who now continue her unfinished struggle in Tunisia. Like the rest of the Arab world and globally, the internet and its once-prominent place in popular uprisings has arguably been hijacked by commercial and political interests which can be bought and sold, and where even revolution has turned into a ‘brand’ or a ‘trend.’
Can Lina’s dream survive in the battle for ideas and the competing dreams of the growing population of disenchanted youth of Tunisia and the rest of the Middle East? Many feel they have no future and are falling prey to the competing forces of consumerism and religious extremism: the age-old battle between the future trying to be born and the past that stubbornly wants to reassert itself at any price.
