When Taha secretly submits to hypnosis, the future begins to fracture. He is pulled toward a house from another time, where ideology, faith and violence have narrowed human life into a series of brutal calculations. A pregnant woman is being prepared for a suicide attack. The fetus she carries, deemed soulless by the men around her, is Taha himself. What initially appears to be dystopia becomes an excavation of origin, a political history collapsing into a family history, until the distinction between the two no longer holds.
Laaridhi resists the idea that memory itself is the enemy. For him, the more dangerous question is ownership: who has the authority to edit, suppress or define what another person remembers? The household at the center of Taha’s visions is not merely a private site of trauma, but a political system in miniature, where certainty becomes a form of power and inherited language is used to justify irreversible decisions.
AM: At the heart of your film is the idea that painful memories can be controlled or erased. Do you see memory as something that can imprison us, or is remembering also essential to understanding who we are?
Kamel Laaridhi: The film is not about erasing pain. It is about who holds the instrument. Hypnosis is a weapon, and the people using it cannot fully control it. Memory imprisons when someone else decides what you keep. So, I do not think memory is a cage. I think it is property. The question is: who owns it?
AM: The film gradually moves from a futuristic dystopia into something much more intimate and traumatic, connected to Taha’s own birth and his mother. How did you approach the relationship between personal trauma and collective or political history?
Kamel Laaridhi: I did not move from the large to the small. The household was already political. It had seceded before anyone attacked it. So the birth is not a private wound inside a public story. It is the same event seen closer.
2059 is only the distance we needed to look at 2014. So I never had to connect the private to the public. I only had to stay in the room long enough.
AM: One of the most debated elements of the story is the discussion around the unborn child and whether it possesses a soul. What were you hoping to explore through this collision between religious interpretation, extremism and the value of human life?
Kamel Laaridhi: The argument is not really theological. Men in that house are deciding a life while quoting something older than themselves. That is how authority usually works. It borrows. I did not want to settle the question. I wanted to show that people who are certain about a soul are often careless with a body.
AM: The film imagines a society that has effectively chosen freedom from emotional pain. Do you think contemporary society is already moving toward avoiding discomfort rather than confronting it?
Kamel Laaridhi: I would not call it a choice in the film. Something was done to people. But the question still stands outside the film. I think we have built very good machinery for turning pain into content. You look at the thing instead of feeling it. That is not avoidance exactly. It is a delay with a screen in front of it. Whether that is new, I cannot say. People have always found ways not to sit with it.
AM: This is your first feature film, and it is premiering in competition at Venice Critics’ Week. What does it mean to introduce yourself internationally with a film that is so formally ambitious and so deeply connected to Tunisia?
Kamel Laaridhi: Venice matters because it puts the film in front of people who will argue with it. That is what I want. Not agreement.