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Rating: 
Summary: Quintessentially Tunisian, and Beautiful.
Review: A picturesque film, to say the least. It takes place in Halfaouine, a small Tunisian town where Noura, a 13-year-old boy, is coming of age. The film had not been called after the town's name; rather, 'Halfaouine' literally translates into roof-hopper - a bird that enjoys watching us, odd humans, from up above just like Noura when maturity's call becomes too demanding or needless. Selim Boughedir plays Noura in an absorbing manner. His beautiful face and sparkling eyes, as well as his manifest intelligence, all summon you towards a love-at-first-sight liaison with him. You find him awakening to manhood's needs and social expectations in delectable and adorable ways. He makes you laugh, question, blush, and dare along effortlessly. Director Ferid Boughedir's aesthetic proficiency heightens Noura's experience in full effect; whether at "Salih's Shop for Shoes, Theatre, and Songs," or Salih, the town's political outcast and Noura's "beau ideal," who is writing a new play about Europeans who never sober up, or the public "Hammam" where women take baths and their clothes off or barely keep any on much to Noura's impish delight, or the takes that show him checking his mother waxing her legs, or Latifa, the seductive divorcee, who finds pleasure in showing him her bras. They all reckon him a small fry, innocently dense, but little do they know! 'Halfaouine' depicts the contraditions and complexities one confronts in a patriarchal society, where a blossoming boy is told stories of an ogre who would burn his hand if he touched a virgin, or turn him blind if he lifted her dress. "Men don't hang around with women," he is warned. He gets beaten up when he's caught with his friends pestering women at the souk. His father, however, as well as all the town's men are free to flirt and canvass as long as they keep it low-pitched. The film's end is both challenging and amusing. It leaves you with a feeling of triumph and a heartfelt smile. Anouar Brahem's music embellishes the film with Tunisian authenticity and the cinematography couldn't be more capturing. 'Inch'Allah Dimanche' was Yamina Benguigui's debut feature and so was Nadir Mokneche's 'Le Harem de Madame Osmane.' 'Halfaouine' happens to be Ferid Boughedir's debut too, and this attests to the richness and glamouring calibre of the Maghreb-Arabe artists. Singular in form and content, they leave their marks on tastes and append to the starved Arab cinema scene an undisputed note of excellence.
Rating: 
Summary: not a big deal
Review: Don't buy this movie expecting anything great.The majority of the movie is watching the kid walk in the streets talking to his friends.Then when they finally do show the supposedly "good scenes", the women cover themselves with pots or towels!! I don't know what is so GROUND BREAKING about this movie.It's no big deal.
Rating:
Summary: not a big deal
Review: Don't buy this movie expecting anything great.The majority of the movie is watching the kid walk in the streets talking to his friends.Then when they finally do show the supposedly "good scenes", the women cover themselves with pots or towels!! I don't know what is so GROUND BREAKING about this movie.It's no big deal.
Rating:
Summary: You have to watch this movie
Review: This is one of the best movies that the Tunisian cinema has produced. It shows you the inside of the Hammem which is a place where women gather to take a 2 hour bath at least. They all get naked and the lilltle kid Nora (Slim Boughedir) goes inside and tries to discover the real world the apples, oranges and cantelopes....
Rating:
Summary: You have to watch this movie
Review: This is one of the best movies that the Tunisian cinema has produced. It shows you the inside of the Hammem which is a place where women gather to take a 2 hour bath at least. They all get naked and the lilltle kid Nora (Slim Boughedir) goes inside and tries to discover the real world the apples, oranges and cantelopes....
Rating:
Summary: coming of age of an arab boy
Review: This moving story gives a believeable, touching account of a Tunisian boy's coming of age. Halfaouine is the name of a popular, working-class neighbourhood of Tunis, where Noura lives. He is first introduced to us as a 13-year-old-boy who is still in his childhood, since he spends all his time with his mother and the women of the house and neighbourhood. We are shown this in an intimate scene in which Noura's mother is removing the hair from her legs in his company, or when he is with his mother and divorced aunt while they are talking of women's things.
Noura has never paid very much attention to such every day happenings, until, prompted by his adolescent friends, he learns two things: that men do not keep company with women, and that women are fascinating creatures. However, the very same discovery of these two elementary facts means that his childhood has finished for good. Noura's last visit of the hamman in the women's time is wonderfully hilarious. He just really SEES how women are for the first time, and is duly discovered by histerically screaming women who see a man's (and not a boy's) eyes examining their bodies (he had promised his buddies an exhaustive report of this visit).
But this awakening of Noura will not be restricted to the way of looking at women. The whole neighbourhood, where he has spent all his life, and the people who are around, are different now, too. He, and we through him, begins to see the importance of the reletions between people, and how what people think or say about you can affect your life in such a small place as Halfaouine, where everybody knows each other. He also discovers you can do things considered bad, provided nobody knows about it, and that anything you do in the open must be submitted to the judgement of your neighbours...or worse (as is the case with his divorced aunt or his politically rebellious neighbour), in short, he discovers that to be a grown-up you must sacrifice your innocence or suffer the consequences.
But, all in all, being a grown-up seems promising from the vantage point of the "terraces" of Halfaouine, where Noura hangs out all day with his friends, and from which he studies and learns about life.
This film not only gives us an account of the coming-of-age theme, it also offers, through the extraordinary testimony of everyday life, among ordinary people in an Arab city, ample proof that the theme is universal and, as such, an apt way of uniting different cultures through something that we all share.
Rating: 
Summary: Taboo breaking film
Review: This truly taboo-breaking film is the first from one of the Arab world's leading film critics, Ferid Boughedir. Warm, sensual and witty, it chronicles a 12-year-old boy's sexual awakening in Muslim Tunisia. Small for his age, Noura has always accompanied his mother to the ladies' Turkish baths. But now, he's not so young that his eyes don't wander to the half-naked women who ignite his imagination. Too old to spend much time with the women who have pampered him for years, he's still too young for the company of men. When released, the talk was over the way it broke new ground in Arab cinema. But with its earthy sensuality, compassion and humor, Halfaouine also became one of the most exquisitely told coming-of-age tales in recent years.
Rating:
Summary: very good
Review: Tunisian cenima always surprise audience with films no one could imagined would be made in the arab world. this movie is a very nice and very funny movie. if you are going to watch this movie for the "good scenes" like one of the reviewers put it, then you will be disappointed because thats not what the movie is about. if you are interested in seeing a good movie then i think you will enjoy this one.
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