Nominated in the short film competition at El Gouna Film Festival, filmmaker Maïssa Lihedheb’s Samra’s Dollhouse marks a new moment for independent Tunisian cinema abroad, one that is intimate, visceral, and unafraid of discomfort.
Samra is directing a film inside an old Tunisian medina house. The setting is alive with textures: tiles that recall another century, walls fading into uneven shades of white, and suddenly the sharp red of Samra’s lips as she instructs her male cast. They dance for her, perform for her gaze. She wants a groom, one who can embody love through steps choreographed by her own desire. She plays the bride herself, inhabiting the role from within his movement.
Maïssa Lihedheb’s Samra’s Dollhouse wrestles with the core tension of marriage as an institution in Tunisia, and beyond. But it is also about the female gaze, and its ability to fracture, invert, or reconfigure power. Margaret Atwood once wrote: “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” Lihedheb seems to orbit this paradox, unmasking its violence and its potential for subversion.
“From the beginning, I knew I wanted a female-driven narrative,” Lihedheb told me. “A story of a woman on the edge. I believe that so-called ‘deranged women’ are often shaped by neglect, abuse, or indifference. In Samra’s Dollhouse, Samra embodies that.” She continued: “After being abandoned by her husband for a German woman, she attempts to reclaim her power by becoming a manipulative director, ensnaring young men who dream of becoming actors and pulling them into her cycle of madness.”
Samra is a woman haunted by abandonment. She fills the hollow left in her heart by directing men, bending their bodies to enact her unspoken wishes.
If she cannot have love, she will script it.
Art becomes both her weapon and her refuge. The men — young, beautiful, almost too perfect, become her instruments, her dolls. Yet the film resists clarity as we rarely see a camera, leaving us suspended between performance and life. Where does the rehearsal end, and where does Samra begin?
Lihedheb traced the film’s origin to a line scribbled in an old notebook: “Casting lovers for closure to replay our end.” “I wrote that seven years ago,” she said, “after a silly heartbreak. I wondered, if I could hire someone to play my ex, just for closure, would I do it? That’s basically how this film began.”
At its core, Samra embodies the hunger for control that emerges after long captivity. At one point, another woman tells her: “Let’s hope it’s the last wedding.” Soon after, Samra is left alone, singing Aman Aman Yalmani. A close-up frames her wide, tear-brimming eyes as she stammers through the song. The familiar Tunisian refrain, once sung in joy and laughter, turns into a cracked cry: “Oh please, please, he traveled and left me alone.” Around her, friends drift away after she lashes out, and solitude collapses back in.
Lihedheb’s creative instinct transformed that moment. “I had written a long monologue for Samra under a spotlight,” she explained, “but Mariam, our lead actress, suggested she might sing instead. I was hesitant, it could’ve been cringe, but when she sang, I got chills. It was raw, emotional, and profoundly Tunisian.” Adding that “In our culture, we sing for joy, grief, and defiance. It felt right.”
The result is a scene that bridges cinema and ritual, heartbreak and myth. Samra’s voice wavers between performance and possession, a reminder that women have always turned to art when language failed them.
What lingers most in Samra’s Dollhouse is its modernity: the way it bends time and identity until both start to blur. We enter a single house in the medina, yet everything feels suspended: moments slip between rehearsal and ritual, object and subject, illusion and truth. The characters look like us — young, hopeful, vulnerable — but their gestures seem choreographed, their freedom contained.
From the rooftop, the medina opens onto mountains and the city of Tunis below, reminding us that Samra’s self-imposed confinement is not hers alone; it echoes the hidden lives of brides across centuries. The textures are ancient, the characters unmistakably contemporary, and together they create a world that feels both lived-in and quietly disquieting.
“Shooting in Tunis was a dream come true,” Lihedheb said. “It was my first time filming in my mother’s land. Working with an almost entirely Tunisian crew was incredibly healing.” Clarifying that “Compared to the fast-paced Western way, in Tunis there’s solidarity. We are aware, political, emotionally present. I learned to pause, to dance, to laugh. Filmmaking isn’t that serious, we’re not saving lives – we’re creating art.”
Lihedheb’s camera is strikingly precise: never prudish, never voyeuristic. Instead, it unsettles by making us complicit, by reminding us that watching is never innocent. The final scene turns that discomfort into shock. Hedi, the chosen groom, discovers the others, the men who weren’t selected, locked away in a room. Samra keeps them captive, her dolls in storage. It is disturbing, but this disturbance is deliberate: a mirror of what women have endured for centuries, their agency curtailed, their bodies confined within the architecture of control.
“Yes and more,” Lihedheb said when asked whether trapping the men was a deliberate inversion. “The men in the basement mirror us, the viewers trapped within a system that no longer makes sense. We’re running on the hamster wheel of capitalism, performing roles we didn’t choose, believing obedience will buy us freedom. But the basement is where most of us live, underneath illusions of progress and success.”
Her metaphor extends beyond gender. The dollhouse is both domestic and political — a stage where love, possession and control constantly battle for dominance. “Samra embodies Europe,” she continued. “She embodies the U.S. She embodies power on the verge of collapse. But she’s also a heartbroken woman replaced by someone younger and whiter. After losing power in her real life, she takes control of her curated one.”
To watch Samra’s Dollhouse is to step inside that curated world, and to feel it crumble. The medina’s textures, the softness of the men’s skin, the hypnotic rhythms of Mezwed music all shimmer with seduction until the tension turns unbearable. Lihedheb calls Mezwed “a cornerstone of the film,” explaining that she wanted to “showcase its richness, its vibration, its intensity, and share Tunisia’s beauty and complexity with the world.”
The film’s political subtext runs quietly beneath this sensual fabric. “We incorporated subtle political layers,” she said. “The main colors in the film are the colors of the Palestinian flag. Initially, I wanted to include the sounds of violence, but later I decided to integrate Palestinian art and colors instead.” Pointing out that the film “mirrors our performative reality, where everything feels staged while real atrocities unfold around us.”
This tension, between artifice and atrocity, beauty and collapse, fuels Samra’s Dollhouse. During pre-production, Lihedheb struggled to justify making art while watching what the UN and other international organizations deemed to be “genocide” in Gaza being live-streamed.
“It felt so pointless to make a silly little short while our people were being slaughtered,” she confessed. “I myself felt like I was trapped in a dollhouse.” Her words reframe the film as an act of survival, a response to helplessness through creation.
Lihedheb’s filmmaking resists victimhood, both in her characters and herself. “I refuse to show marginalized characters as victims,” she said. “I believe in justice and in taking power away from oppressors. Samra mirrors male directors who exploit younger women for a false dream. She also represents political powers that dictate our morals and rules. We give away our agency just to fit in, to be ‘good citizens.’”
That refusal defines her cinema. Whether in her early short Hundefreund which explored domination and inequality through the love story of two men in contemporary Germany — or in Samra’s Dollhouse, where a Tunisian woman turns the tables, Lihedheb probes domination and delusion, illusion and control. Her influences from Almodóvar to Haneke, from Nouri Bouzid to Paul Thomas Anderson, echo in her framing and psychological layering, but her vision remains distinctly hers: feminine, diasporic, political without preaching.
At El Gouna Film Festival, Samra’s Dollhouse’s nomination signaled a turning point for Tunisian independent cinema, particularly films made by women. “I’m really grateful the film can finally travel after so many rejections,” Lihedheb admitted. “The most important thing for me is that Tunisian talent and Mezwed music get to travel the world.”
Yet her reflections on the festival circuit reveal the inequities embedded in global recognition: “It’s extremely expensive to attend festivals, especially American ones. They rarely cover flights or accommodation. It’s really inaccessible. But that’s a conversation for another time.”
If Samra’s Dollhouse is about reclaiming control through artifice, then Lihedheb’s own path mirrors that gesture in real life. Her film is both confession and rebellion, a portrait of a woman confronting systems that confine her, whether cinematic, emotional, or geopolitical.
From the medina’s dimly lit corridors to the echo of Aman Aman Yalmani, Lihedheb captures a very Tunisian form of heartbreak: one steeped in song, humor, and defiance. “I want people outside Tunisia to be curious about our beautiful country,” she said. “We have more stories to tell than post-revolution narratives. Our films can be about more than just poverty or trauma porn.”
In the end, Samra’s Dollhouse is not just about one woman’s heartbreak. It is about structures of power: domestic, cultural, historical, that turn love into captivity. It is about what happens when a woman reclaims the keys, even if it means becoming her own jailer.
