‘Red Path’ movie review: Of stolen childhoods and the barbarity of extremism
With raw and restrained language, feature debutant Lotfi Achour tells a gut-wrenching story of a stolen childhood and a desperate search for resolution and purpose
(Originally published in The Hindu on November 26, 2024)
Not every blue moon does a piece of art pervasively sustain the anxiety of living in a dehumanised world, without overt dramatisations, throughout its runtime. In Arabian filmmaker Lotfi Achour’s Red Path — which competed at the International Competition section of the 55th International Film Festival of India — the inciting incident that rattles our bones comes in mere minutes after we are introduced to the arid Tunisian plains, where only the hostile find any shelter of permanence.
We see a teenage shepherd, Nizar Nouri (Yassine Samouni), take his 13-year-old cousin, Achraf (Ali Hleli, a performance that articulates the slightest of thoughts), and their goats, beyond the Mejri Path on the rocky slopes of Mount Mghila, Tunisia — a border of conflict between the government and the jihadis. Nizar wants to show Achraf the pocket of a paradise that prevails untouched on these mountains. They lay bare on the warm rocks, toss around on the pools of water in rocky depressions, and speak about the time the ocean would have covered the mountain.
Doom strikes the boys like thunder. Achraf, beaten mercilessly and befuddled, wakes up next to the severed head of Nizar. “Show it to his mother and maybe then you’ll all learn not to come here,” he was told by the jihadis who vanished as quickly as they had appeared. Paralysed by shock, Achraf thoughtlessly picks up Nizar’s head and journeys back to their village. Only to immediately witness a landmine kill his goats, all except a baby goat named Tatouss.
With Tatouss, resting inside his jacket, and a duffel bag that gets bloodier every passing minute, Achraf idles around, wishing he didn’t have to be the one to bear the news to Nizar’s mother Mbarka. In a rather interesting turn, Acraf…
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