For decades, the Carthage Cinematographic Days (JCC) were a total event. Not just a festival, but a moment of collective excitement. The whole city of Tunis breathed cinema. The city center cafés were transformed into impromptu debate circles, film buffs moved from one room to another, directors met students, critics, the curious. The JCCs were everywhere, visible, alive, organic. Tunis became, in the space of a few days, a capital of African and Arab cinema, of cinema from the South.
This breath gradually weakened when the festival was moved to the Cité de la culture. Cinema has moved away from the city, the public has fragmented, the excitement has diluted. But this decline, regrettable, remained reversible. What happened recently is not.
2023: the first break
In October 2023, a sudden ministerial decision led to the outright cancellation of the JCC, a few days before their opening. The shock was immense in the cultural world. The festival was ready, the selection published, the guests expected. The argument put forward – the regional situation – had not convinced anyone. It was the first clear break between power and a major cultural institution, the first serious alert on the way in which culture was now treated: without consultation, without consideration, without respect for the constructed balances. A first that we could have done without. The JCCs have never been canceled, not even during Covid.
December 2025: one scandal too many
The 36th edition of the JCC, which closed last Saturday, December 20, marked a much more serious shift. This time, the festival was not canceled. It was confiscated.
The Ministry of Cultural Affairs interfered in the work of the international jury and in the very running of the closing ceremony. Decisions were made outside the authority of the festival, against the most basic international practices. The result was a chaotic ceremony, emptied of meaning, and a unanimous boycott by the Grand Jury.
The declaration of the international jury is overwhelming in its very sobriety. Five days of rigorous viewing, hours of deliberations, voluntary commitment, assumed responsibility. Then, a few hours before the closing, the discovery that the jurors would be deprived of their public role, that their motivations would not be read, that the prizes would be awarded by others.
Faced with this denial, the jury made a heavy but dignified decision: not to attend the ceremony. Not on a whim, but on principle. Because a jury is not a stage set. To deprive him of speech is to undermine the very integrity of the festival.
An institutional alert from the cultural community
Brahim Letayef, respected director and member of a jury commission, chose the path of institutional responsibility.In an open letter to the President of the Republiche recalled that the JCC are one of the pillars of Tunisian cultural diplomacy, observed well beyond our borders. Above all, he insisted on an essential point: when the administrative decision encroaches on artistic judgment, it is the international credibility of the country which falters.
Fahem Boukadous, secretary general of the SNJT, asked even heavier words. He did not speak of frontal censorship, but of something more pernicious: the organized disappearance of speech. A ceremony reduced to a cold protocol, a ritual emptied of its substance, a word that has become individual initiative, almost an audacity. It is not noise that has been banned, it is meaning that has been neutralized.
An already discredited minister
This scandal comes at a time when the Minister of Cultural Affairs, Amina Srarfi, is already strongly contested. Heard by Parliament last summer, she was criticized for her management, the state of the sector, the failures of the 2025 Carthage Festival, the absence of a clear artistic vision, despite an increasing budget. Added to this are serious suspicions of conflicts of interest, particularly around Tunisian participation in the Osaka Expo.
The JCCs were therefore not victims of an isolated accident, but of an already weakened mode of governance, marked by the confusion of roles and the appropriation of the public institution.
Amina Srarfi, or the art of damaging everything
What happened at the Carthage Film Days can no longer be explained by amateurism, or even by incompetence. Amina Srarfi does not arrive at this scandal free of all suspicion. She is already a contested minister, weakened by chaotic management, disorganized festivals, a glaring absence of artistic vision and heavy suspicions of conflicts of interest. The JCC is not his first failure. They are the outcome.
By interfering in the work of the international jury, by validating – or allowing – a humiliating staging for the jurors, by accepting that the closing ceremony be emptied of its substance, the minister has not only mismanaged a cultural event. It damaged an emblematic institution, observed and respected well beyond Tunisian borders. It damaged one of the rare spaces where Tunisia continued to exist other than through crisis, repression or isolation.
A diet that sabotages everything it touches
But Amina Srarfi’s responsibility does not stop at her ministry. She is the faithful representative of a regime which, for years, has worked to methodically dismantle all intermediary bodies. The business world has been weakened by arbitrariness and legal insecurity. Unions are delegitimized and bypassed. Political life is suffocated. Banks live under permanent criminal threat. The media are intimidated, pursued, weakened. Justice is exploited. Everywhere, the same logic: break, subdue, neutralize.
Touching the JCC today is therefore neither a deviation nor an exception. It’s an extra step. After the economy, social affairs, politics, finance, information and law, the regime is now attacking culture. Not by accident, but by consistency. Because a power that fears speech, debate and collective intelligence always ends up fearing artistic creation. And when he cannot silence it head-on, he empties it of its meaning, its rites, its voice.
The Carthage Cinematographic Days were not only mistreated. They were symbolically desecrated. By transforming them into a controlled event, without free speech, without a visible jury, without public recognition of artistic work, the government sent a clear message: even that which still escaped its logic of domestication must now fall into line.
This is the scandal of the JCC 2025. And that is why it goes far beyond a minister, a ceremony or a festival. It reveals a regime which, incapable of building, only knows how to destroy what is still standing.
