Tunisian-French documentary filmmaker Sonia Ben Slama was born in 1985. She grew up in Paris, where she studied art and cinema at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University. While completing her second master’s degree, she directed two short documentaries, which were produced by Serge Lalou for Les Films d’Ici and Catherine Derosier-Pouchou for the Louvre Museum. In 2015, she directed her first feature-length documentary, Maktoub, produced by Les films de la Caravane. Machtat (2023), her second feature-length documentary, had its premiere in the International Competition at Visions du Réel and was part of the ACID programme at the Festival de Cannes. Her next documentary, 316 North Main Street, is in development.
Fatma and her two daughters, Najeh and Waffeh, are machtat — wedding musicians — in Mahdia, a small city in Tunisia. The sisters follow opposite paths: Najeh, divorced, tries to remarry to escape the authority of her brothers, while Waffeh wishes to divorce her violent husband. Fatma navigates between the two, praying things will get better one day.