Tunisians in motion: Performing and narrating the (non-)political in Leyla Bouzid's As I Open My Eyes

Abstract

Abstract The film À peine j'ouvre les yeux (As I Open My Eyes, 2015) by Leyla Bouzid condenses performance and narration to create a space alternating between normative discourses prescribed by ruling elites on the one hand and the subjectivity of human agency on the other. Recent developments in the Maghreb have noted that issues previously attributed to the private realm, the cultural or social sphere are being politicized and thus become the focus of public controversy. Following postcolonial, cultural studies and space-theoretical concepts, the epistemological interest of this article is linked to a flexible, media-theoretical notion of the political, so as to discuss specific forms of social/private spheres and discourses of knowledge production in a critical analysis with questions about individual/collective agencies based on examples in the film itself.