1996. Directed by Ferid Boughidir. Produced by Marie Francoise Mascaro. Cinares (Tunisia), Marsa Films (Paris), Lamy Films (Brussels)

Synopsis
La Goulette is a small harbor town in the suburbs of Tunis where various cultures and population groups have lived together in harmony for ages. The balance is threatened when three teenage girls declare that each will find the man of her dreams by the day of procession of the Madonna. Each thus falls in love with a boy of an opposing religion. Far from this causing the families to split, it brings them closer together but the peace is disrupted with the outbreak of the Six-Day war. While the film shows the easy mixing of groups in La Goulette it also shows the distinctive cultures that exist in the privacy of the home.

CRITIQUE
Summer in La Goulette is a sprightly film whose breezy camera style mimics the adventurousness of the three girls - Moslem. Christian and Jewish - as they explore the boundaries of intercultural relationships which their parents deny themselves. The film is an allegory on the religious conflicts of the Middle East, and the opportunities for reconciliation and social interaction lost by their parents' more rigidly, religiously bound, generation. It also shows us the hypocrisy of fundamentalism and how easily it becomes sexually corrupted.

(Written by Keyan G Tomaselli, 1998)