A Conversation with Amel Guellaty (WHERE THE WIND COMES FROM)

Tunisian director Amel Guellaty just premiered her feature-film debut, Where the Wind Comes From, at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (where I reviewed it). The movie offers striking visuals and a compelling story of friendship in a road-trip structure, showing class and cultural divisions across Tunisia. The two stars—Eya Bellagha and Slim Baccar—play besties Alyssa and Mehdi, who travel south from the capital city of Tunis to the island of Djerba to see if Mehdi can win an artistic competition. The prize? A trip to Germany and a ticket, they hope, to a better life. I had a chance to talk with Guellaty by Zoom during the festival, and here is that conversation, edited for length and clarity. Guellaty’s English is quite good, though I have adjusted phrases here and there to better fit American idioms.

Hammer to Nail: The first thing that struck me in your movie was the precision of your framing. Your film is beautifully photographed by cinematographer Frida Marzouk. Could you please discuss why you chose such careful—often almost symmetrical—images and how you worked with Marzouk to achieve that?

Amel Guellaty: Thank you so much. As a photographer, it was one of my goals to do this kind of movie. I love images and I said that to my actors before the shoot. I said, “I am giving you all my time during rehearsal because all my time on set is going to be for the image. So you have to come prepared to know what kind of emotion you have to get out because I can prepare with you, but it’s too complicated to prepare the image as I want, so meticulously, before the shoot. I have to do it during the shooting.” So this is what I do. I rehearse a lot with the actors and then when I arrive there, my time is spent setting up a good shot. The image is really a passion for me.

And I came with a book during the shoot. Frida was like, “Oh my god, what is this?” “These are my references!” (laughs) And my references go from Ida to Pulp Fiction to Asian movies … all over the place. But I have a reference for every shot in the movie and I have a storyboard for every shot in the movie. And what I wanted was to not take the road-trip format rule, which is to take the handheld camera and go. I instead wanted to go toward the imagination part and to go to the realistic part and to create really organized images in the chaos of Tunisia. Also, it’s my aesthetic. I love this kind of image.

And in Black Mamba—Black Mamba was my first short movie—there was a day shoot and a night shoot. And during the day shoot, the main character is just a young woman and at night she is a boxer who does underground fights. The idea was to do handheld camera during the day and kind of a white light and then during the night use warm light and really precise shots. And I hated it because the first part, it wasn’t my aesthetic. And even though I had thought about it to say, “OK, this is the reality and the fighting is her, not her imagination, but her dream,” I didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t doing something that was aesthetically close to me.

So here, I decided, even though I was doing a road trip, I didn’t care and I would stick to what I wanted and what I liked, and what I like is the organized shot. I also want the  shot to speak as much as the dialogue because the idea was to always get the two main characters in the same shot, to not do a shot-reverse shot, except if they’re fighting. So when they’re fighting, they’re in different shots. And even if they’re in the same shot, something is between them so the idea is that you can see the connection through the image and you can see the beauty and the stability of their relationship within the chaos of Tunisia.

HtN: Speaking of the chaos of Tunisia, throughout the world right now, and not just in Tunisia, there are many young people struggling to figure out the future and define a meaningful path forward. What would you say is unique about the situation in Tunisia?

AG: Tunisia is between two worlds: it’s an Arab and a Muslim country, with the roots of the Muslim tradition in it, and at the same time it is the most open-minded country in the Arab world. Abortion is legal in Tunisia. They have laws to make sure that women’s rights are preserved in Tunisia. So you have this mix between the tradition part—the Arab Muslim part—and the really open-minded part, some kind of Western part, let’s say the good parts of the West. And it’s a mix of this in Tunisia, and this is what makes the youth really interesting and really creatively open-minded, but still in a real economic crisis and political instability. They have to face all of these problems.

And I think the mix of Tunisia also comes from the fact that it is in the north of Africa and everybody colonized us … the whole world, Rome, the Greeks, the Vikings, the Arabs, the Turks, the French. So it’s a really mixed country. Look at me: I’m blonde with blue eyes and I’m a hundred-percent Tunisian. You can find a lot of different types in Tunisia. The beauty of this country is in that mix.

A still from WHERE THE WIND COMES FROM

HtN: That’s fascinating. Speaking of this mix, your film definitely highlights two different Tunisias. You show us the very wealthy and the much less fortunate. Are such wealth disparities worse than they once were? At some point they reference the previous dictatorship and how things are no better now. How would you say things are now compared to how they have been?

AG: So during the Ben Ali years—the dictator between 1987 and 2011—the good thing that he did, though he didn’t do a lot of good things, was to create, or preserve, let’s say, a middle class. So Tunisia is not like Morocco. In Morocco, there are really poor people and really rich people. In Tunisia, there is this huge middle class. But with the crisis after the revolution, and not only because of the revolution but because of the economic crisis, this middle class become much poorer and smaller. But I think the biggest gap between the richest and the poorest in Tunisia is the cultural gap. There is a big difference. The rich are going to speak way more French and are going to say, as they do in the movie, “Oh, I know how Arab people are.” They don’t consider themselves Arabs.

This is really weird. And this is why they don’t look at the youth as beautiful. They think that they don’t want to work and they don’t want to move. So there is a cultural gap; they are way more Western. So this is the biggest gap for me. Not only the money, but also how they see the world and how they consider themselves. If you take Saudi Arabia or another Arab country, they feel all Saudi. They’re really proud of it. Whereas in Tunisia the rich are going to say, “Oh, we’re not Arab, we’re not like this. We are Phoenician.” They go back to 3000 years ago. (laughs) So it’s weird.

HtN: (laughs) Going back to the visuals, you chose a particular type of black-and-white drawing for Medhi to compose of Alyssa. How did you land on that kind of artwork to be his thing?

AG: I wanted to create surrealistic images and I worked with a really talented artist from Gabon named Willa. I have this color code in the movie with red and yellow and blue but I wanted that drawing to be black and white, to add some deeper level. I was so scared that the movie would be too candid or too childish because during the script-writing process some people said it’s a bit childish. And I was like, this is not what I want. I don’t want any childish reference. This is why I choose the black and white to make the difference between reality and to make it a little bit deeper and more tortured.

HtN: Where did you come up with the idea of Alyssa’s own imagination taking over the image, whether it’s emanating from her hand or appearing in the sky or when she levitates in the nightclub?

AG: Because my imagination works like this. My imagination is not that poetic, but definitely when I don’t feel good or when I am uncomfortable, I use my imagination for a kind of escape. And I always felt that was such a strength of my personality because sometimes I sleep like this. It is like meditating, it’s for my mental health. I don’t know why we don’t use imagination more for mental health because for me it’s really like a way to get out of my troubles and to go into a world where everything is however I want it to be. And so this is why I wanted to put that in the movie.

It was really complicated in the beginning because I didn’t find a link between Alyssa’s imagination and the rest of the movie. But once I found the link between Alyssa’s imagination and Mehdi’s drawing, I thought, “OK, this movie is ready to go.” And it made sense that they inspire each other. It made sense also to add another layer to that friendship to make it even deeper, that they share an imagination, that they inspire an imagination. So this is how I ended up doing this.

And then during the post-production, we talked a lot about doing 2D or 3D, and also to avoid any childish moments with 2D and to mix their imagination with reality to not get out of the reality, because I didn’t want to make calibration changes or specific edits. I wanted something really mixed in with the reality. Which is why I decided to make it 3D.

HtN: How did you cast Eya and Slim as Alyssa and Mehdi?

A still from WHERE THE WIND COMES FROM

AG: I’ve known Eya for a long time because she did the stunts on my first short, Black Mamba. It was a short about a woman boxer and Eya is a boxing champ in Tunisia. So she was the one who really boxed in my short movie and I loved her face and her energy. So I kept her in my mind. And when I started the auditions, I called her and said, come do the casting. And she was amazing. At the first audition, I knew it was her and I said to my producer, “OK, I’m going to see other women just to please you, but I already know that’s her.” With Slim, it was more complicated because I didn’t know him. And also I had a less precise idea of what Mehdi should look, whereas I knew that Alyssa had brown hair or black hair, and I had an exact idea of what I wanted.

So I saw a lot of people and even called him back four times. The fourth time, he said, “Enough! Pick me or another!” I was like, “OK, I pick you.” And I needed them to have a really strong relationship, a really strong friendship. So I saw each one alone and then together to see how it worked. But they knew each other from before. They weren’t friends, but they knew and respected each other from before and had followed each other’s career. So I was definitely happy to see a good connection between them.

HtN: They definitely do have a good rapport. I’m curious about the choice to have it be a German art competition. Is there a lot of German investment in Tunisia right now? I would expect that the obvious choice would have been French.

AG: This is maybe why I didn’t pick French. (laughs)

HtN: That makes sense.

AG: No, to tell you the truth, France lost its, how to say … For example, before, in Tunisia, everybody spoke French. A bad French maybe, but everybody spoke French. Now if you go to speak with any young person in Tunisia between the ages of 0 and 25, they’re not going to speak French at all. Everybody speaks English because of TV, the shows, the movies. And France also has such bad politics around immigration and how they treat Arabs in France that nobody wants to go to France anymore. They want to escape Tunisia, that’s for sure, though. And if they’re in France, they’re going to be really happy. But France is not the dream anymore. Germany is way more the dream. United Kingdom is way more the dream. Even Italy is more the dream because it’s a question of politics. So this is why I didn’t go for France.

HtN: Your own English sounds like it has a French accent, though. Is French your first language beyond Arabic?

AG: Because I’ve been to French school.

HtN: (in French). That makes sense, then. I am half-French, but it was easier to just do the interview in English.

AG: (in French) Ah, OK! Well, I’m used to doing these interviews in English by now, anyway.

HtN: (in English) In any case, thank you so much. This was great!

AG: Thank you!

– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)

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