Férid Boughedir’s first feature-length film, "Halfaouine," the most successful film ever made in Tunisia, tells the story of a twelve-year-old boy, Noura, who lives in Halfaouine, a working-class neighborhood in the old city of Tunis. Ostensibly about the awakening of desire and Noura’s transition to heterosexual maturity, it offers an amused and affectionate portrait of Tunisian society, while at the same time lamenting the encroaching police state. The film’s phenomenal success at the box-office can be attributed in part to its lightness of tone and comedic aspects, which play on Noura’s youth and inexperience, as he seeks on the one hand to be taken seriously as a young adult, and tries on the other to hang onto the liberties he still enjoys as a boy, one who can move with relative freedom in both the public sphere dominated by men and the private sphere dominated by women. Critics tend to follow the director’s suggestion that "Halfaouine" is a tale “seen through the eyes of a child trying to find his way in an adult universe, within a conservative society where strict separation of the sexes rules.” And it is easy to agree with Boughedir when he insists that he wants to show in his film “a Mediterranean society, exuberant and affectionate, where humor and eroticism always have their place, along with tolerance,” adding: “I believe in the liberatory virtues of laughter and of eroticism—I believe, like the writer Georges Bataille, that ‘eroticism is the approbation of life even unto death.’” But critics tend also to avoid almost completely any discussion of the film’s darkly pessimistic parallel-narrative about patriarchal oppression and the brutality of the police state. The film makes it abundantly clear that the father’s heavy-handed authoritarianism should not to be taken merely as an unlucky element of Noura’s biography, but should be seen as emblematic of an authoritarianism that permeates Tunisian society and finds its ultimate embodiment in the President of the Republic himself. In allegorical mode, the film describes the steady erosion and loss in Tunisia of the individual’s liberties and freedoms, as the state reaches deeply into the private sphere and causes unhappiness and dysfunction everywhere.