Vague Visages’ Who Do I Belong To review contain minor spoilers. Meryam Joobeur’s 2024 movie features Salha Nasraoui, Mohamed Grayaâ and Malek Mechergui. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Much of Who Do I Belong To is shot in intense close-ups, lingering over the characters’ faces or over their shoulders, almost always in shallow focus, the landscape behind them drawn in anonymous blurs. But what happens when the entire movie is drawn out in this style? Plenty of films make a coherent argument for deploying a very specific, rigid aesthetic for the duration — Who Do I Belong To grossly misjudges it.

The debut feature by Tunisian-Canadian Meryam Joobeur (Brotherhood) follows a farming family in the hills of Tunisia. The two eldest sons disappear suddenly one night, and it appears they’ve joined ISIS, leaving mother Aïcha (Salha Nasraoui), father Brahim (Mohamed Grayaâ) and little brother Adam (Rayen Mechergui) in shock. When the eldest brother Mehdi (Malek Mechergui) returns some time later, with a niqab-bearing pregnant wife, Reem (Dea Liane), the family members are torn between the joy of reunification and the angst of the future, with Mehdi now a wanted man.

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There are gestures towards magical realism, with Aicha gifted with strange semi-prophetic visions. But Who Do I Belong To finds itself stuck in an indeterminably slow rhythm, unable to rouse any drama or excitement. The constant close-ups serve not to generate any identification with the protagonists, but rather to separate them from their environment. The lush green mountainscapes, misty and ragged, are seen as a smudge (the few times Joobeur tracks back, the images feel noticeably more powerful and earthly). 

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Occasionally, the camera might linger on a puddle of water and the raindrops that color it, or it might single out a blade of grass. But a blade of grass on its own means very little: a blade of grass only means something because of the field it sits in. This family exists in a relationship with its environment, but the decision to bring the camera in so close cuts off that wider frame. Worse still, it results in grief porn, with the camera forever lingering on faces in pain and sorrow. But what is that pain and sorrow without context?

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Joobeur doesn’t explain the radicalization of the two eldest brothers in Who Do I Belong To. The value of their farm livelihoods isn’t clear, or the daily habits of the family’s work. The presence of Bilal (Adam Bessa), a young local cop and long-term family friend, gestures towards a complication of authority figures and how to respond to childhood friends when they radicalize. Again, though, these details lead nowhere. Who Do I Belong To is social realist cinema at its stodgiest and most self-serious.

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As is so often the case with filmmakers from the MENA region (Middle East, Northern Africa), the rest of the African continent or from Latin America, Who Do I Belong To is financed significantly by richer countries through an internationalist co-production (Tunisia, France, Canada, Norway, Qatar). This is simply the way it is now. But how does international financing affect the work itself? 

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It changes what is and isn’t possible onscreen. The filmmaker pitches and develops their work amongst funders who live thousands of miles away, and in a completely different context. How does a Tunisian shepherd become radicalized? I don’t know, and I’m sure the average person in Canada, France, Norway and even Qatar doesn’t know either. But radicalization is, for Western funders, the easiest and simplest hot button topic to fund when it comes to films rooted in Muslim-majority cultures. Movies largely financed by and about Muslim-majority cultures rarely break out of this ghetto. To earn entry into this world, filmmakers have to self-Orientalize by recreating the savage land dreamed of by the rest of the world.

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This doesn’t mean that such films don’t have to be terrible. Kaouther Ben Hania’s internationally-produced Four Daughters premiered at a “Big 5” festival (Cannes in this case) and is similarly about radicalization — a boundary-blurring documentary about two women who join ISIS. But the film folds in on itself. The two absent daughters are played by actors who are coached by the remaining family. The mother has the option of being replaced by an actor while re-enacting scenes she finds too painful. It’s a complicated, knotty, contradictory work, which turns the real issues into something concrete, giving agency back to the people who lived through it, rather than simply repeating the iconography of pain and suffering that’s expected from these stories.

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It is clear that excellent work is possible in this infrastructure. This year’s Golden Bear winner, Dahomey by Mati Diop, shares France, Senegal and Benin as its countries of production, and the director has already proven herself a filmmaker of authorial vision with Atlantics (2019). But what about those voices who don’t quite have the confidence to break out of this self-Orientalizing gaze? They are stuck in a self-perpetuating spiral, unable to shift their craft beyond the obvious tropes expected of their milieu.

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There is also a question of platform. Where have the films in question been seen and in what context? I’m finishing this review not long after a litany of winners at this year’s Berlinale from all over the world used their moment on the stage to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Many senior cultural figures in Germany, including those that fund Berlinale, have accused these filmmakers of anti-semitism. Meanwhile, Berlinale itself has been almost entirely silent on the genocide, in marked contrast to the festival’s stance on other wars and crimes against humanity. There is something deeply submissive about Who Do I Belong To. It is the Muslim world as the West wants to see it: poor, savage, troubled by terrorism. The film’s never-ending close-ups reveal endless pain but no context or contact with the surrounding world, thus avoiding certain truths nobody wants to confront. Perhaps this isn’t the fault of Joobeur or her cast and crew. Filmmakers play the cards they’re dealt and do the best they can. It might be time to knock over the entire house.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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