HAMMAMET — The 60th edition of the Hammamet International Festival closed on Thursday evening with a concert by Sofia Sadok at the open-air theatre, on 13 August, Tunisia's National Women's Day. The edition, which opened on 11 July, carried thirty-two performances, most of them sold out.

Sadok did not confine the evening to her own catalogue. She sang "La Ma Narjaechi", "Mel Ghorba Mallina" and "Ya Lil" to an audience that filled the terraces and sang them back, then moved through a medley of Saliha and another of Oum Kalthoum before returning to her own repertoire with "Ya Lalen", "3amel Fi Li Nheb", "Dadal" and "Rani Hourt Maak".

The scheduling was deliberate. The festival's organisers had announced in early July that both the opening and the closing of the anniversary edition would be given to women: the opening went to Wafa Taboubi's award-winning play Les fugueuses, the closing to Sadok. The final night therefore fell on the anniversary of the 1956 Code of Personal Status, seventy years on.

An anniversary edition that filled its house

The edition was programmed as a survey rather than a retrospective. Thirty-two shows drew on artists from twelve countries — Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, the United States, Mali, Spain, Portugal, Cuba, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria and Italy — across music, theatre and dance, with Dhafer Youssef returning with Shiraz, and Faraj Suleiman and Marcel Khalife among the July dates. A documentary and digital exhibition, Endless Memories, opened at Dar Sebastian on 31 July, the anniversary of Bourguiba's inauguration of the open-air theatre in 1964.

That most performances sold out is the figure worth holding onto. Tunisian summer festivals are routinely described as being in crisis — squeezed budgets, late programming, competition from private concerts. Hammamet's sixtieth suggests the audience is not the problem.

What the sixtieth did not settle

The festival still publishes no attendance total, no box-office figure and no breakdown of public subsidy against ticket and sponsorship revenue. Without those, "most shows sold out" is a claim rather than a measurement, and the institution cannot demonstrate to a finance ministry what it is worth.

Comparable Mediterranean festivals of similar age — Avignon, Spoleto, Athens Epidaurus — publish annual attendance and revenue reports as a matter of course, which is how they argue for multi-year funding rather than negotiating each season from scratch. The Hammamet festival's own archive, now digitised in the anniversary exhibition, is the beginning of that institutional memory. Turning six decades of programming into six decades of published data would be the harder, and more useful, second half of the exercise.

The Carthage International Festival, also in its 60th edition, closes on 19 August with Majda El Roumi.