Biography
Baya Medhaffar is a multidisciplinary artist whose journey spans cinema, music, and cultural programming. She discovered the world of cinema as a young actress after being scouted for the lead role in Leyla Bouzid’s film As I Open My Eyes. This experience led her to move away from acting toward other creative spaces that offered more personal and conviction-driven modes of expression: directing, research, and programming.
As the artistic coordinator and programmer of the Gabes Cinema Fen festival in Tunisia, and later invited in 2023 as a programmer for the “Premiers Films” festival at Artagon Pantin, she also participated in Cinéma du Réel, curating the “First Window” section. Her growing interest in sound and music became central to her work, motivating her to start an album project after receiving a grant in 2023. This exploration of sound took on a new dimension with the creation of her first short film, Festina Lente (2021), where she experimented with weaving images and sounds together to move beyond explanatory narratives in favor of a more poetic approach.
Following the events of October 7, 2023, Baya Medhaffar began archiving videos from social media as part of a “thinking/sorting” process, which served as the foundation for writing and editing a film she started in early 2024.
Project
At Providenza, she focused on the second phase of this film’s creation, where music and sound take center stage. Tale of the Children of Darkness explores the role of images in transmitting history and resisting colonial violence within the Palestinian struggle. In an era of instantaneous and brutal documentation of atrocities, the film restores images as tools of resistance, transforming them into acts of memory and collective action.
The film revolves around two symbols of Palestinian resistance: tunnels and songs. While the tunnels represent an underground, strategic struggle, the songs, steeped in heritage and solidarity, transcend the horrors. Through a sensitive and poetic approach, akin to storytelling, the project avoids mere denunciation, instead delving into the darkness of the tunnels and revealing, in the bomb flashes, the tragic beauty of a people in resistance.
This documentary serves as a counter-narrative to propaganda, capturing the human reality of collective resistance. It celebrates the love, culture, and resilience that endure despite erasure attempts, affirming the right to exist in the face of oppression.
