'Damn it's dark, but I love it': Adam Bessa's role in 'Harka' embodies the role of Tunisian firestarter

To prepare for his role in Lotfy Nathan’s new feature-length film Harka, French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa flew to Tunisia three weeks before the shoot.

He rented a flat in the city of Sidi Bouzid and spent the time alone, listening to hip-hop and wandering the streets, trying to access the mind and body of the character he was about to portray.

The film tells the story of Ali, a young Tunisian man selling contraband petrol on the black market and dreaming of a better life in Europe.

Harka, which translates to “the fire” in Arabic, was inspired by the life of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself aflame in December 2010, catalysing a chain of demonstrations across the region that would become known as the Arab Spring. 

"Adam’s acting is electric, charged with a battery of pressure and rage so believable it earned him the Un Certain Regard Award for Best Performance at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival"

The role would be Adam’s most challenging yet, both for the physical conditions of the shoot (under the hot sun of successive 40-degree days) and for the deep obligation he felt as a Tunisian to do the story justice. Best known for playing a young policeman in Matthew Carnahan’s 2019 drama Mosul, Adam said that he had been looking for a project in Tunisia, and immediately connected with Lotfy’s script the first time he read it. 

“I said ‘Damn it’s dark, but I love it,’” he recalled, speaking over a Zoom call from Paris, where he’s currently shooting another film. “It was a beautiful story, something I could relate to, a character I found really powerful in terms of what he represents in today’s time, what he says about Tunisian society, about the youth.”

The three weeks of isolation prior to filming were educational, he said, helping him get in the right headspace to play a character struggling on the country’s margins with little opportunity to pull himself out. 

“When you start to be really alone and not talk to anybody, something funny happens,” Adam said. “You start to dialogue with yourself. You make the questions and the answers. I thought that would be interesting to see on screen, someone who’s so disconnected, he doesn’t need to communicate with anybody.” 

In the film, Ali is hoping to use the money that he earns selling fuel to buy a ticket to Europe, but his plans are put on hold after his father dies, leaving behind a pile of debt that risks costing the family their home.

When his elder brother leaves town to work at a resort, Ali is suddenly thrust into the position of caretaker for his two younger sisters without the means to carry out the job.

Over the course of the film, we watch him face innumerable humiliations at the hands of bureaucrats and police officers as he struggles to secure work and a future for his siblings.

Adam's acting is electric, charged with a battery of pressure and rage so believable it earned him the Un Certain Regard Award for Best Performance at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. It’s clear from a conversation with the actor that his portrayal of Ali reflects a deep compassion that he has for youth around Tunisia and the world who share the character’s troubles. 

Dominant systems of cultural production are constantly selling young people fame and the kind of lives that wealth can buy, Adam mused, but “What if you don’t make it? What if you don’t have the means to make it? What if you don’t have the opportunity, the chance? It’s very difficult to project yourself [onto a future] that your reality doesn’t match,” he said. 

"It's important to give them [refugees] a voice because they went through a journey, and we can learn a lot from that"

The events in Harka take place in the 2020s, a decade after Bouzizi’s self-immolation and the subsequent “Jasmine revolution,” which unseated Tunisia’s long-time ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

While it is technically no longer an authoritarian state, activists and political analysts have warned that the country is slowly slipping back into dictatorship.

Last year, amidst a steadily worsening economic crisis, voters passed a constitutional referendum that vastly expanded the powers of President Kais Saied by weakening the parliament and sidelining the justice department.

Many members of the opposition boycotted the vote due to concerns over corruption. But Adam waved off the suggestion that Tunisia could be headed back to the political conditions it was in prior to the Arab Spring. The generation after a revolution will always struggle to find its footing as the country tries to figure out how to move forward, he said.

“There's an economic crisis now because the system was rotten for 25 years, so when you open the doors [to the government], you realize it’s a fake house,” he said. “You have to rebuild everything.”

Today, record numbers of people — both Tunisians and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa — have been attempting the perilous journey by boat from Tunisia to Europe.

Adam spoke with The New Arab days after one of these makeshift vessels sank, killing at least 25 people.

Over 400 migrants died crossing the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year; more than 20,000 have perished in the sea since 2014. Adam said that while it would be easy to wave these numbers off as the inevitable suffering of millions, a product of the inequitable structures that make up the modern world, it’s important for audiences to reckon with the conditions that lead people to the water’s edge. 

“It's important to give them a voice because they went through a journey, and we can learn a lot from that,” he said. 

Harka is out now in select theatres in the UK and is expected to make its U.S. debut in the coming months. Adam will also star in Motherhood, a Tunisian film by Academy Award-nominated director Meryam Joobeur, which will launch in festivals later this year. 

Lylla Younes is an investigative data and environmental reporter at ProPublica, a commissioning editor and writer at Newlines Magazine, and an adjunct professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.