Berlinale 2026: In a Whisper | Interview with Leyla Bouzid

Leyla Bouzid is not a stranger to Berlinale, although this is her first time as a director of a competition film at the 76th Berlinale. Her first feature film As I Open My Eyes won at the Venice International Film Festival in 2015 and her second, A Tale of Love and Desire, was screened as the closing film at the Semaine de la Critique at Cannes in 2021, so as a filmmaker, Leyla feels elated yet nervous as we sit for a tete-a-tete on her new film In a Whisper (original title: À voix basse), which is getting a lot of praise from the audience.

In a Whisper is a film that folds family secrets, queer desire and inherited silence into a single, intimate house in Sousse.

After the success of her debut As I Open My Eyes and her second feature A Tale of Love and Desire, Bouzid’s new film consolidates her place as one of the most compelling contemporary voices exploring youth, bodies and freedom across North Africa and Europe. If her earlier work charted the collision of personal awakening with political and social constraint, In a Whisper turns that tension inward, into the thick air of a family home where everything is felt and almost nothing is said aloud.

Born in Tunisia in 1984, Bouzid studied literature at the Sorbonne before training in directing at La Fémis in Paris, and that doubleness between Tunisia and France, text and image runs through her filmography. Her short films, including Soubresauts (Mkhobbi Fi Kobba), Zakaria and Gamine, already probed questions of belonging and displacement.

In a Whisper takes a look at the domesticated situation of family and sexual orientation in Tunisia. “The film is telling about the untold, the taboos, the secret family which is hidden, and the way, even though it’s unsaid, it’s still resonating in everyone and creating a misunderstanding,” says Leyla, describing a narrative in which a buried story slowly forces its way to the surface.

The title evokes this movement from secrecy to articulation: a whisper that becomes “louder and louder,” yet remains spoken “beneath,” never fully claiming public space. At the centre is Lilia, whose “new kind of family,” a lesbian relationship and, eventually, a child must find a way to coexist within a larger clan rooted in tradition, gossip and an intense attachment to appearances.

One of the film’s most striking ideas is that silence can be inherited like an heirloom. She is explicit about this, speaking of generational trauma as something passed down in societies where family is the base, creating deep roots but also a powerful pressure to conform. Rather than staging a simple clash between individual freedom and oppressive kin, she “didn’t want to propose a rejection,” but to imagine how Lilia’s chosen family could “belong to this big family” without erasing difference. In this sense, In a Whisper extends the trajectory of As I Open My Eyes and A Tale of Love and Desire: all three films ask how young people can claim intimate freedom, whether musical, sexual or emotional, without severing the bonds that formed them.

Formally, the new film is anchored in a house that Bouzid calls “the main character,” inspired directly by her grandmother’s home in Sousse. Shot with cinematographer Sébastien Goepfert, the interiors are sculpted in chiaroscuro, with strong exterior light leaving the rooms in semi-darkness, so that characters often appear in backlight or as shadows. Over the course of the film, windows open, the house slowly brightens, and the visual arc mirrors the narrative movement from repression toward a fragile visibility. “The building itself is ambiguous, able to feel at once like shelter and prison, alive with layers of time; when Lilia returns, she seems to encounter her own childhood self in corners that have not changed for years,” adds Leyla.

And within this house, Leyla sets a matriarchal microcosm. The grandmother rules the interior with an iron fist that is nonetheless recognisably feminine, rooted in care as much as control. Leyla states that while Tunisian society remains patriarchal, the domestic sphere is often “women’s territory,” a reality she wanted to foreground by filming “a family of powerful women, and not victims.”

Leyla also touches upon the casting of Hiam Abbass as Lilia’s mother, which deepens this dynamic; she recalls the almost impulsive way she approached her at a festival and how the actress’ ability to inhabit silence and fill it with multiple emotions became crucial to the film’s tone. Watching Abbass guide both the character and the younger actress Eya Buteraa, the film again becomes a story of intergenerational transmission, this time behind the camera.

This film also makes explicit the asymmetry in how Tunisian society perceives male and female homosexuality. “While same-sex relations are criminalised for all, men are more exposed to police violence and legal persecution, whereas women’s relationships are often dismissed as childish play, with the assumption that we can marry her, and she can have a child, even if she’s a lesbian, we don’t care.” Leyla refuses to set gay men and lesbian women against each other; in fact, Lilia’s path forward is intimately tied to her uncle’s story, and in one key garden scene with a lawyer, their fates are brought into the same frame. The final image of a child inscribes queer love into the family line, suggesting continuity rather than rupture.

For Leyla, “art that never bothers anyone is maybe boring,” and she insists that Arab filmmakers should not withdraw from major festivals, especially at a time when they also feel compelled to speak loudly in solidarity with Palestine.

Looking ahead, Bouzid is preparing her next project, for the first time adapting a book and once again centering “a lot of women,” possibly across multiple generations. She is adamant that women directors should not be confined to women’s stories; her second feature’s male protagonist was a deliberate assertion of that freedom, but she also recognises how rarely cinema grants central roles to grandmothers, mothers and middle-aged women, filmed with sensuality and respect. In a Whisper, with its layered house of women and its insistence that whispered truths can still shake foundations, feels like a natural, quietly radical step in that ongoing journey.

Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.