Selma Baccar

Selma Baccar (1945) is a Tunisian filmmaker, producer, and politician, known for her pioneering role in feminist cinema. After studying psychology in Lausanne and film in Paris, she began making films in the 1960s, including The Awakening (1966), her first short. In 1975, she directed Fatma 75, the first feature film by a woman in Tunisia. Though state-funded, the film was banned for over 30 years due to its bold critique of the gap between legal reforms and lived realities for women. Baccar went on to direct El niño de la luna (1989), Khochkhach (2006), and El Jaida (2017), and in 1990 became Tunisia’s first female producer. Her activism led her into politics, where she played a key role in the post-revolution Constituent Assembly of 2011. “I bear witness to my society by way of cinema,” she has said, “with all its contradictions between man and woman, law and practice.”