TUNIS — "Bakma," the new feature by Tunisian director Abdelhamid Bouchnak, had its world premiere on 11 August in the Fuori Concorso section of the 79th Locarno Film Festival, which runs until 15 August in Switzerland. The National Centre for Cinema and Image (CNCI) welcomed the selection this week in a statement congratulating the director and his team.

The film runs 117 minutes. Bouchnak wrote, directed and edited it. Fuori Concorso — "out of competition" — is Locarno's showcase for work the festival wants seen but has placed outside the competitive sections, and it carries no prize.

Tunisia's presence at the festival is not limited to the screening. The director and actress Afef Ben Mahmoud sits on the jury of Cineasti del Presente, Locarno's competition for first and second features, which is one of the more closely watched discovery sections in European festival programming. The CNCI described the combination as "a double presence" and a marker of Tunisian cinema's standing internationally.

Bouchnak, who came to wider attention with the 2018 horror film "Dachra," has described "Bakma" as a film about silence and about those who are silenced — about a youth still being told to wait, and a society in which violence has become ordinary, according to remarks reported by Tekiano when the selection was announced in July.

What the selection is worth, and what it is not

Festival selections are the currency of a film industry that has very little other currency, and it is worth being precise about the denomination. A Fuori Concorso slot at Locarno is a genuine international platform: it puts a film in front of sales agents, programmers from other festivals, and critics whose coverage determines whether a title travels. It is not a prize, and it does not by itself secure distribution.

The structural point behind both stories is the same. Tunisian cinema keeps producing individual results — selections, jury seats, prizes at Carthage and abroad — while the domestic exhibition base that would let those films find an audience at home remains thin. A country of roughly twelve million has a small number of active commercial screens, concentrated in Tunis and a few coastal cities. A film that premieres in Locarno in August may not reach a screen in Kairouan or Gafsa at all.

What is being proposed

The CNCI's own instruments — production grants, festival support, and the co-production framework that has made several recent Tunisian features possible with European partners — address the making of films. The gap is downstream.

Two proposals recur among Tunisian producers and exhibitors. The first is rehabilitation of closed cinemas in interior governorates, an approach the culture ministry has pursued in stages and which industry figures argue needs a stable multi-year budget line rather than one-off renovations. The second is a national distribution and outreach circuit — mobile screenings, cultural centres, school programmes — of the kind that events such as the summer "Ciné Vague" screenings in Monastir demonstrate on a small scale each August.

Neither would change what happens in Locarno. Both determine whether the work that gets celebrated abroad is ever seen at home.