Behind the Mountains

Rafik is a desperate man. Released from a Tunisian prison, where he served four years for smashing up the office where he used to work, he is now convinced he can fly and is determined, in the face of his family’s scepticism, to prove to his young son Yassine that his vision is real. Taking the boy out of school and heading to the mountains, where he finds temporary refuge by invading a bourgeois family’s country house, Rafik is clearly mentally unwell. Whether he can fly or not remains an open question, however, cleverly teased by the director Mohamed Ben Attia and by Majd Mastoura, who is both persuasive and dignified as Rafik. By renewing the conventions of a road movie and with the Dardenne brothers co-producing, an unexpected journey of father and son evolves into an exquisite example of magical social realism and, simultaneously, an homage to the strength of one's will. An automatic writing-inspired film that seems to have sprung from the depths of the most luminous subconscious, urging us to expand our definition of the metaphysical. Or in the words of Hamlet: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.”