By Abdallah Jradi
« On the hill » A film by Belhassen Handouss
This year’s Carthage Film Festival offered a peculiar reminder of how cinema sometimes insists on highlighting personas long after the screen goes dark, and long after they are gone. As usual, the festival did not fail to present me with one particular documentary in this edition, just as it did last year , where I saw an eye-catching documentary. This year, the documentary On the Hill by Belhassen Handous raised expectations.
It is a tribute to Miss Bergmann, a woman who lived in Tunisia for a long time, leading a humble lifestyle and raising horses. In the film, we see her becoming one with nature in a way that turns scenes into silent echoes. We watch her move, breathe, swim, and age; her slow life unfolds with the same slow rhythm the film creates. The film is constructed as direct cinema, a choice that removes interviews altogether and lets her life appear with so little commentary, yet so much meaning. The workers, those who take care of her horses, move patiently with her. Even when their paychecks are late, they stay. Even when frustrated, they understand her.
A reminder to “the human” that reunites us all. It is as if they are tending to an old tree in every shot, a tree that is no longer productive, yet they water it and care for it. This absence of direct statements becomes the documentary’s own point of view, making the ordinary feel like an act of admiration.
One particular shot, for instance, takes place when an old friend comes and washes her feet. The angle reflects a certain tribute to the calm, persistent gestures that tie one person to another and tie the lady to nature. The act holds no violence, no cruelty, no gore, it’s extremely simple and empty of all evil … yet the world around it contains all of these things, a sort of a protected microsystem where everything persists.
Then, unexpectedly, that calm rhythm breaks. Bureaucracy appears, not as an argument, but as a heavy presence. The authorities ( the embassy representatives ) enter only after having been so absent, becoming an elemental force in the story. Life goes on, yet this intrusion shifts the air of the film. It becomes clear that what once felt endless is fragile; that even a humble lifestyle can bend under the pressure of documents, orders, forms, and administrative scenes that erase quiet gestures with the weight of rules. In a scene where they mourn their dead, this contrast sharpens: the unspoken struggle appears after the tree has died, with no shadow left to hide what came before. We see the lady disappear, and the film continues to unfold…
And so, this œuvre becomes an unexpected lesson in how memory rises. While watching horses receive their medicine, while noticing workers care for them without mention of pay, while seeing an old friend mourn her with a cigarette, the film reveals to us what that admiration and love were, in a sense, what we lost to that violence, bureaucracy and cruelty, all edited together, leaving us with the idea that everything persists.
The film does not separate these elements; it allows them to exist side by side. The lady who lived so long in Tunisia becomes not only a figure, but a mirror reflecting how politics affect the life of even the most regular naturalist…especially after they are gone. They are not absorbed by the land, but rather by the state. But against the state, the people who surrounded this lady mourn her by caring for the horses. Her horses become her continuation, a silent testimony that no matter how trivial the state considers such individuals, their symbol persists.
Thus, the Carthage Film Festival once again gave me a peculiar documentary, one that mixes a humble lifestyle with the persistence of nature, one that rises beyond expectations by being a direct cinema work that relies on no interviews whatsoever.
A documentary you’d watch while going to sleep but won’t forget; the image of Gizela Bergmann will always persist.
