In 1905, Albert Samama Chikli was a local Tunisian amateur filmmaker, shooting and screening his very first films in his native country. In 1906 Urban/Eclipse acquired Tunny Fishing in Tunisia, and he became a filmmaker, one who went on to make a considerable contribution to the moving images that were then marketed and seen worldwide. Up to 1916, at least 60 non-fiction films and newsreel items shot by Samama Chikli, mostly (but not only) in Northern Africa were distributed by Gaumont, Pathé, Le Lion, Cines and Eclipse. Several of them were re-edited well into the 1920s. Many of them have survived, and thanks to the participation of Gaumont Pathé Archives in the Samama Chikli Project, we were able to present in recent years a series of restorations made from original negatives held by Gaumont. This year, we have looked for positive prints, as they include the intertitles and in some cases colour, added by the production companies to the negatives bought from Samama Chikli. The spectacular colourations of Tunis and Surroundings and L’Oasis de Gabès en Tunisie (both 1912) are a striking proof of the great importance non-fiction films held in the early 1910s. Later generations have inverted the values; Samama Chikli was remembered not for his international career as an independent maker of non-fiction films, but for directing Tunisia’s first two fiction films, Zohra. L’Odyssée d’une jeune francaise en Tunisie (1921) and Aïn-el-Ghezal. La Fille de Cartage (1923). But it is Samama Chikli’s daughter Haydee Chikli (1906-1998) who should be acknowledged as the groundbreaking pioneer. As a talented adolescent she wrote the treatment and the screenplay of Zohra at the age of 15 and two years later of Aïn-el-Ghezal; she also plays the lead roles. The two works sadly never circulated, never found a distributor and had only a very short local screen life and a single print as material base. Not surprisingly, they have mostly been lost. Of the 1,500m of Zohra, 189m survive. As with the presentation of Aïn-el-Ghezal in 2024, we propose a reconstruction of the missing images and intertitles of Zohra using film fragments, documents and photo materials from the Albert Samama Chikli Archives, plus three little snippets identified in 2023 in the Cinémathèque française.

Mariann Lewinsky