Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Tunisia but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.

Country: Tunisia
Movie:   تحت الشجرة [Under the Fig Trees]
Director: Erige Sehiri
Year: 2021
The Elevator Pitch: The movie follows a group of day laborers as they pick figs. This organic, drifting film follows the stories of over a dozen people, especially a handful of teenagers, over the course of one work day as they navigate social and emotional ties between themselves.

How Was the Movie?: This film feels more like a docu-drama than an actual film. At times this really works in its favor making you feel like a fly on the wall watching some young folks who would rather drum up interpersonal conflict with each other than pick figs, but a lot of the time the camera just kind of floats and we’re left waiting for the next thing to happen. The movie touches on a lot of topics including harassment, education, exploitation, religion, the structure of society, and even grief but it never delves too deeply into any of them so I felt pretty unsatisfied at the end. I think I was most struck by the relaxed nature of the work more than anything else though that may be a set up for the movie. Having been on farms before and seen the work done on them (at least, in America), this kind of drifting inefficient work seemed almost comical and farcical to me.

The film works its absolute magic in the moments when characters confront each other between the trees. There’s so many stories that the film is following it’s actually hard to pick out a favorite, but I did love when all of the teens were sitting around eating lunch together and watching Instagram reels because it feels like one of the many little touch points that must be happening all over the world. I also really liked the old women and their stories. I wished we had a little more focus on their stories or that they interacted with the teens more, both of would have been interesting to me.

Also towards the end of the film everyone gets paid for the week and one by one they approach the boss and one by one he attempts to cheat them, no matter their social standing or their work, out of their money. He’s not even doing it in a mean way sometimes, just making them bargain, and some extent, beg for their money. I felt that in my soul.

I’m not sure I’d recommended this film because I actually think it’s too floaty and vague to have much depth and I felt myself drifting off into my own thoughts a lot during it. If you have any familiarity with tough work done for low pay with a lot of people around, the movie really captures that so honestly but beyond that it felt limited.

What was for Dinner?: 

I made brik, which the internet tells me is a cousin of borek but at least from the recipe I followed, these were basically two entirely different filled, fried pastries. It was extremely hard not to burn the outside of the pastry at the same time as cooking the egg to a somewhat decent consistency but I managed it, mostly (while burning my hand all over). This was very good though it’s hard to argue with potatoes, egg and cheese in a fried pastry case but there are way more reasonable and easy (!) ways of making something like this. 

For the main course I decided to make borzguen which is a fancy couscous usually made with sheep meat which I don’t eat so I made mine with chicken thigh. It has dates, nuts, and raisins and orange blossom water so it’s got that slightly sweet flavor to off-set what should be gamey meat. I threw in some carrots for color. This dish was really delicious, I made the couscous in a regular bowl with hot water even though that’s not the traditional Tunisian way and I oven roasted the chicken so basically this is the least authentic way to make this dish but I simply do not have a specialty couscous steamer and poached chicken is probably no where near as delicious as poached sheep but I’d give this dish an A+ either way. Hopefully I captured at least a little bit of the spirit of the dish.

I wanted to make a dessert for Tunisia, specifically makrud, which seem not dissimilar to Fig Newtons to me, but I was having just the worst day when we watched this so I didn’t get to. For dessert instead we ate a bunch of dried figs (not pictured) so at least it was thematic.

That’s it for Tunisia, see you next in Austria!