program description

The celebrated and sought after Tunisian cinematographer, Frida Marzouk, blends documentary and narrative styles using her instinct for vérité and signature handheld fluidity. Marzouk’s open and airy approach has offered her subjects both authority and intimacy, establishing a regionally influential cinematic language along the way. Whether placing the audience up close, in the shallow depth and intimate tension between actors, or in wide shots, between fraught social environments and personal experience – her camera is attuned to all the human truths of relating to each other. 

Never compromising technique for genre, having begun her career as a set electrician, Marzouk’s strategy has been to light the entire scene rather than a single position, encouraging actors to move about freely. This way, she too benefits from the freedom to follow naturally, in slow yet magnetic pursuit of feeling and action. With production experience spanning North Africa, Europe, and North America, Marzouk’s independent film credits include collaborations with Lina Soualem (DoP – Bye Bye Tiberias, 2023), Erige Sehiri (DoP – Under the Fig Trees, 2021; DoP – Promised Sky, 2025), Scandar Copti (second DoP and camera operator – Happy Holidays, 2024), Nadine Labaki (camera operator – Capernaum, 2018), and Abdelatif Kechiche (lighting technician – Blue is the Warmest Colour, 2013), to name a few.

This programme captures a cross-section of Marzouk’s early and mid-career work as a DoP on short and feature length independent productions: Elyes Baccar’s Tunis By Night (2017), Ihsen Kammoun’s Road to El Kef (2022), Firas Khoury’s Alam (2022), Cynthia Sawma’s Scenes from Home (2022), Erige Sehiri’s Under the Fig Trees (2021), and Lily Ekimian Ragheb and Ahmed T. Ragheb’s She Sings (2024). Watched together the films reveal Marzouk’s fluency with light, colour, contrast, and movement, all in the service of her talent for finding – and then framing – the power in the personal.