Arab Blues

Arab Blues (Un divan à Tunis, 2020) is a French-Tunisian comedy you can watch online on iFILM. Director Manele Labidi follows Selma, a Paris-trained psychoanalyst who moves back to Tunis to open a therapy practice — only to find that nobody quite knows what to make of her or her couch.

Getting licensed turns into a bureaucratic maze, relatives treat the whole enterprise with gentle bafflement, and the first patients to knock on her door arrive with a wonderfully chaotic mix of secrets, anxieties and questions that Tunisian society had long kept unspoken. Golshifteh Farahani plays Selma with exactly the right mix of determination and exasperation — she's funny without telegraphing the jokes.

What makes the film work is Labidi's refusal to condescend to either culture. The comedy lands not because traditions are mocked, but because the gap between what Selma expected and what she finds is genuinely absurd and human. A sharp, warm debut feature. Stream Arab Blues (2020) online on iFILM.