28 April 2022, 19-21PM

OM LAYOUN, A FILM BY HABIB AYEB

Om Layoun – La Mère des Sources – is a feature-length documentary film that aims to open a societal debate, in Tunisia and elsewhere, on the absolute and urgent need to better manage available water resources, through the adoption of new economic models oriented towards more water, ecological, social, intergenerational and economic justice. The film is based on a simple idea: water is a common good for all of humanity, and access to it, in line with needs, is a fundamental human right that should not suffer any preconditions. As a necessary condition for biological and social life, water must not be considered a marketable commodity, as it is today. This is what Om Layoun tries to demonstrate, discuss and defend by showing situations of scandalous waste and/or shocking deprivation induced by the internal mechanisms of the water market and, more generally, by the dominant extractivist economic model, situations exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Filmed in Tunisia, Om Layoun starts from the local to address the global and uses numerous "Tunisian" situations to discuss the issue in its diversity and complexity, which goes far beyond national borders.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/545121973

Habib Ayeb is a geographer, researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Paris 8 in Saint-Denis. He is also a founding member of the Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment - OSAE. His interests include food sovereignty, the environment, peasant issues, climate change, marginality and poverty, and the dynamics of resistance. His latest publication is the book Food Insecurity and Revolution in the Middle East and North Africa. Agrarian Questions in Egypt and Tunisia, London, Anthem Press, 2019 (with Ray Bush). He is also a committed documentary film maker which has produced Couscous: Seeds of Dignity (2017), Fellahin (2014), Gabes Labess (2014).

The film will be shown in Arabic with English subtitles and followed by a discussion with the film’s director on questions of water, land, food and technological sovereignty.

This event is done in collaboration with Lagrange Points and has received the generous support of FNRS and MSH.

Thursday 28 April 2022, from 19pm till 21pm

Lagrange Points
Rue des Tanneurs 114
1000 Bruxelles