TREATMENT

FOR AN ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

TITLE: ‘NEVER WITHOUT MY SON’

GENRE: (1 x 60) or (4 x 30) Minute Documentary Feature/Series.

LOGLINE

‘Never Without My Son,’ is a social justice documentary about the moral courage of a
twenty-seven-year-old mother, Basmat Alkamel to unify with her two-year-old son, Joud.
A personal story, exploring the driving force of motherhood, set against a long line of
corrupt officials and scabrous men who have amputated her from her son and profited
from the adoption of her baby.

BRIEF SYNOPSIS

‘Never Without My Son,’ is one of the most stoical and heroic stories you’ll hear this year.
The tale of Basmat Alkamel is a precise picture of a social dilemma for women in Tunisia.
Civil society throughout its rural areas can be rigidly stratified and the resources of the
State have disfavored young women like Basmat.

This situation is exacerbated in the areas where complex social structures and young
women struggle to assimilate the values of progress. Tunisian women, like most Arab
women, perform all the domestic tasks and look after the family and children. It’s the old
story of modernism versus traditional norms. It is arguable that Tunisian rural culture still
assigns a higher value to the male gender and therefore marginalizes women to this day.
Basmat’s story is a case in point.

Her relationship with a man which was distraught and full of infidelity, has corrupted her
life. And yet, you sense the brilliant and ambitious woman underneath, a university
graduate who had a future and a child, and lost both.

Basmat is struggling hard in a man’s world where men have become essential but
impossible. Life has therefore made her a fighter, and the documentary floodlights her
battle from the beginning, to the middle to the end. Localism and modernism are in conflict
in Tunisia today and so the story of Bismat Alkamel becomes its ultimate expression.

LOCATION FILMING & EVENTS

Filming and interviews at sites described with locations across Tunisia including its
capital, Tunis.

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INTERVIEWEES

The Documentary is rendered in the first person with Basmat Alkamel telling her own
story. However, we break her narrative frequently with supporting interviews. On the
theme of men having the upper hand in jurisdiction and arbitration, we interview Samir
Ayyad, Sociologist at the Higher Institute of Human Sciences, Tunis. On the theme of
empowering Arab women economically and socially, we interview Sonkeina Bourraoui,
Executive Director, Center of Arab Women for Training & Research.

Basmat fears the bad intentions of the organizations that took her son away. Trampling on
due process and her rights. Her point is that the laws that exist are not enforced. For an
experienced opinion on this aspect, we interview Juwayoeh Jijah, Tunisia’s first female
Judge.

UNDERLYING MATERIAL (IP)

The story, treatment, chain of title and license rests with Noon Films Limited, London.

INTRODUCTION

A true story which is current, the Documentary is set in Tunisia, the great and historic
landmass that looks north to Europe with its back to the Sahara. Diamond shaped Tunisia
is no stranger to cross currents between fundamentalism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism
and modernism. Always a zone of tension and cross fertilization.

On the one hand, Tunisia is a success story for Africa as the most economically
competitive with the highest life expectancy on the continent at 72. Nine out of ten
households are connected to electricity. The country abolished polygamy and 40% of the
capital’s judiciary are made up of women.

And yet, in the tale of Basmat Alkamel, there are still reasons for women to be nervous,
proving that Tunisia, despite its potential, has competing visions of itself. Women are still
prey to misfortune and the film demonstrates how corruption in Tunisia is driving a
wedge between the bonds of nature and motherhood.

BASMAT AS NARRATOR

The narrative of the Documentary is carried by Basmat Alkamel in the first person. She
will recount the unimaginable and yet, do this willingly because injustice prevails and she
still remains distanced from her son by Tunisian authorities. She is however anxious to
relay a full inventory of her tragic, unresolved story because after all, there’s always hope.

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Basmat speaks with appalling gravity about the events that have led to the humiliation of
losing her baby. About her fatigue, the wasted time that she could have had as a
nurturing mother, of being constantly afraid and famished and continually on the run. In
the telling, one tries not to think about the hundreds of other Tunisian women who suffer
a similar plight.

Basmat is almost always ‘on,’ because the trials of securing her son continue. It would be
understating it to say that she has tried everything that a single woman can do. There is
something that is formidable about Basmat. What we are witnessing as she tells her story,
is pure determined motherhood, which makes her a real and convincing narrator for this
film. She’s clear eyed about the job of committing to this Documentary.

This will count as one of the most halting social Documentaries of the year. Basmat is the
reliable narrator of her own story, showing the workings of a powerful and energetic
mind that is honed by years of anxiety. She makes the story intelligible to us only because
she wants her son back in her arms. In a real sense, this Documentary and her direct
involvement is an appeal, a call to action to the viewer.

Basmat’s story is rendered in four parts of approximately ten minutes per part, including
third party interviews.

PART I - REJECTION FROM THE TRIBE

Who does not recognize Basmat’s situation? The pseudo-respectable fiancée who engages her
and promises to marry the women he enjoys sex with, who shrivels when he discovers
her pregnancy and in fact, runs away from the small, poor, conservative village which
they share.

It’s a surprise because she’s a ‘catch’, a graduate and is only in the village because like
most women in her position, she can’t find employment and takes up her traditional
position as a woman, cloaking her ambitions.

Basmat’s life up until this point was normal. However, on discovering her pregnancy, her
partner rejects her, her family reject her, distancing themselves and finally kicking her out
of the only secure shelter she has ever known, the family home.

Rural life in Tunisia can be brutal. At this point, Basmat has a raw sense of injustice about
what has happened to her, a typical one for a young woman from a small village and a
big family with no resources. She begins to look at the world in a different way. She
describes how common this is: “If you talk to the women in my village, several have a story
similar to mine.”

At this point, the Documentary takes a hard look at the conditions of rural women in
Tunisia, as the Government does not recognize this subject as a distinct challenge.

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Tunisian women have no illusions about their vulnerability, as the sociologist Samir
Ayyad says: “If you have someone like Basmat who tries to raise their status, they can’t.” Samir
advances her observations further, aware that Tunisian politicians currently don’t
recognize rural women as a source of their society’s strength. She says:

“They recognize women in the cities, why not elsewhere? Why hold women back? As a rural
woman, you can see the rungs of a ladder but there are no hands to help you up, no community
kindness or support and Government is invisible.”

PART II - THE BIG CITY

Ill and undernourished, Basmat arrives utterly exposed in Tunis. Nowhere to live, carrying a
child. This is survival pure and simple. She struggles day by day on the sympathy of passers-by,
offering either food or a bed for the night. At this stage, Basmat’s story proves that poverty comes
in many flavours and hers is perhaps the bitterest. There are no Government angels in her life at
this point. Clearly, she’s on her own.

The film conveys the smells and street sounds of how life looked to Basmat, as she slept in the
streets of Tunis as a pregnant woman. The Documentary invites the viewer to look beyond the
victim and to hear the story for what it is, that of a frightened single woman moving through the
dusk of a large city. Huddling for safety in corners, in the mornings without breakfast, almost
zombie-like, brainwashed by a society that has fully rejected her.

PART III - CORRUPTION

Only one path is open to Basmat. She endures the streets for months and finally ship
wrecks at a hospital when time comes to have her baby. Reaching for her new born after
recovery, she discovers that the hospital has taken away the son she has named ‘Joud.’ In
society’s eyes the child is ‘unlawful,’ Basmat is ‘itinerant’ with no prospects for
employment, and now has stepped in to steal her right to mother the newborn.

The scene now moves to a local state-funded orphanage as Basmat encamps outside the
building and every morning, storms its reception to demand the return of her son. Finally,
after months, her persistence pays off in part, as they offer to release her baby pending
receipt of a rental agreement and letter of employment.

Basmat recounts all the attitudes to her predicament at this crucial stage. The city, its
institutions, the attitude of the officials she encounters, the potential employers. There are
no sympathetic ears to be found, she only receives widespread condescension, as if she
has brought this all upon herself.

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 PART IV - HOW LONG WILL THIS GO ON?

Basmat refuses to let the loss of her baby cripple her life. She continues her life-affirming
journey employing the only asset she has, the well-spring of motherhood with its special
energy and motivations.

Cleverly, Basmat disengages from her society and takes a distinctly modern approach.
She posts a strategic appeal on Facebook, to help her find accommodation, a place to work
and discovers at last, a caring community response, albeit virtual. She secures a job and a
place to live.

Overwhelmed by the thought of finally being reunited with her son, Basmat takes her
hard-won official papers and heads to the orphanage, presenting herself at the manager's
office. She is then given the shocking news that in the interim, whilst she was settling her
status in the eyes of authority, that her son has been given away for adoption. Joud is now
many miles away, living with a French family.

The beautiful simplicity of a mother’s love for her child and yearning for the bliss of a
reunion, continues to propel this Documentary forward. Unbowed by the latest turn of
events Basmat, along with a groundswell of online sympathisers, hires a lawyer to file a
suit against the orphanage. Though Basmat has a water-tight case, legal attempts to
retrieve her son either fail or are stone-walled, with the orphanage submitting falsified
paperwork in an attempt to prove that they have acted within the law. Officials associated
from the State side are bribed to tow the false narrative.

And it is during the court case, that perhaps the most soul-destroying reality is revealed.
Joud has been adopted, but the transaction happened less than a month after his birth.
Whilst the orphanage was denying Basmat the right to access and sending her on a
useless errand, the truth was that her son had been already sold to the highest bidder.

CONCLUSION

To admire Basmat is to admire the toughness of her mind and the steadiness of her gaze.
It is dispiriting to know that she is today, no closer to getting her son back as she was
when she lived on the streets of Tunis. No one has reached down to restore Basmat’s
pulse, her heart has stopped, at least until she has her son back by her side.

Thus, we have a story of a woman with a powerful mind, sterilized by men who only
offer diffidence and a corrupt social order. The Documentary promotes a measured sense
of outrage in the viewer at this plain fact.

Basmat has only encountered further agonies and remorse and she is still a long way from
a healing process. She is now 27, Joud is nearly 3. There is no answer to the inescapable
question: how long will this go on?

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Perhaps the Government is too poor to pay much attention to Basmat’s plight, preferring
the more heroic aspect of its achievements, than with the suffering of its population.

Of course, Basmat has tried hard to get further hearings but because the story involves
government extortion, all authority is quick to look away. So, who is left to fight for
Basmat in the world? Who will defend the jilted single mother? Feed her when the state
will not? Interviews with Sonkeina Bourraoui and Juwayoeh Jijah take us on a civics
lesson of what happens to women in Tunisia in Basmat’s situation.

They remind us why good institutions matter. Why honest men matter. Why protection of
a mother’s right to keep her own child matters – as if that really needed emphasizing.

Ultimately, this is the story of a heroic, independent-minded woman from a rural region
in Tunisia. It can be heart-warming if viewed from the right angle. Whilst the central
predicament of uniting the mother with her child remains unresolved, the viewer is
invited to make up the deficit by simply caring.

Was it a vain hope for Basmat to believe she could succeed? Was it a project that should
have been discarded before it began? The Documentary says the contrary. Basmat has
never lost her sense of motherhood through this sorry tale and her courage in pursuing
and upholding her rights as a mother is the central theme of this film.

The issue of returning Joud to his mother’s care, is the irresistible tension that exists
throughout the Documentary. Do all of Basmat’s failures to regain her son take something
away from our admiration? Certainly not. If anything, the opposite is the case. Basmat’s
story teaches us something about intelligence and the human bond, about the audacity to
continue when you are at your lowest ebb.

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