Raja Amari

Amari’s work, particularly Red Satin has been argued to have opened up new avenues and opportunities for the portrayal of Tunisian women in film and society. Author Stacey Weber-Fève asserts that Amari’s portrayal of the protagonist, Lilia, performing housework in the first few scenes of the film, “captures concretely the possibility for (re)appropriating female representation in contemporary North African cinema.” She also asserts that Amari, “levies new debates addressing interpretations of performances of women’s traditional roles and desire for self-expression in contemporary Tunisian society by engaging in a multilayered manner the ideological implications of this traditional social construct of the housewife and her comportment.”

In Melissa Thackway and Olivier Bartlet's review of the 2015 Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (Festival Panafricain du Cinéma de Ouagadougou, FESPACO) in "FESPACO 2015: After the Transition, What Next?", they remark that Amari's film about the Tunisian Spring was the only film that stood out among the 'Features' portion of the festival. They noted that the film was "a quality television drama about a group of young musicians' diverging response to the turbulence of the Arab Spring."

"Typically, in Arab films and Tunisian films you have a woman who is in conflict with the society, and she'll fight against it. I didn't want that. That was not my subject. Lilia, the character played by Haim Abbass, actually finds her freedom in the context of what I call social hypocrisy. She is involved in a society that is hypocritical in the sense that there are two worlds out there: the world of the night and the world of the day. What you do--what you really do--you do not show. She finds a compromise in the sense that society is like that. She just adapts to society. She does what she wants, but she doesn't show it to the world." -Raja Amari, Indiewire, August 20, 2002

Born in Tunis, Amari trained in dance at the Conservatoire de Tunis, gaining first prize in dance in 1992. She then studied Italian at the Società Dante D'Alighieri in Tunis and later studied French Literature at the University of Tunis. For two years she wrote for Cinécrits, a film magazine edited by the "Association Tunisienne pour la promotion de la critique cinematographic." In 1995, Amari attended FEMIS (L'Institut de Formation et d'Enseignement pour les Metiers de l'Image et du Son) in Paris to study screenwriting. After graduating in 1998, she began to work on her film portfolio. Her film Satin Rouge was screened at la Berlinale 2002. Her film Buried Secrets was an official selection at the 2009 Venice International Film Festival.

Raja Amari (born 4 April 1971) is a Tunisian film director and script writer. She is best known for her films Satin Rouge/Red Satin (2002), and Dowaha/Les Secrets/Buried Secrets (2009), both of which have earned international awards and recognition.

"I have always wanted to make a film revolving around belly dancing. I trained for many years as a belly dancer at the Conservatoire de Tunis [Academic Dance Institute in Tunis]. I also grew up watching musicals of the golden age of Egyptian cinema from the 1940s and 1950s that are still played on television today. My mother and I loved the well-known belly dancer Samia Gamal and the singer Farid al-Atrash." -Raja Amari, Interview with Bouziane Daoudi in Zeitgeist Films