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Tunisia has made its Oscar pick, selecting Take My Breath, the debut feature from director Nada Mezni Hafaiedh as its entry for the 2025 Academy Awards in the best international feature category.

The drama follows Shams, a young seamstress whose tranquil life unravels when their intersex identity, and the steamy love triangle in which their are entwined, is exposed. When Shams is targeted by an obsessive attacker, they are forced to escape to the capital city of Tunis.

Amina Ben Smail, seen alongside Gael García Bernal and Renate Reinsve in Pierro Mesina’s Berlin film festival entry Another End, plays Shams. Sana Ben Cheikh Larbi, Mohamed Mrad, and Fatima Ben Saidane co-star. Slim Hafaiedh of Leyth Production and Ziad H. Hamzeh of Hamzeh Mystique Films co-produced.

Take My Breath had its world premiere at the Warsaw Film Festival last year and has been a box office hit at home.

Mad Solutions,...

Mad Solutions — the Middle East and North Africa region’s leading sales agent and distributor of Arabic-language films — has acquired the world sales rights for Tunisian director Nada Mezni Hafaiedh’s debut feature “Take My Breath,” which world premiered in the International Competition of the Warsaw Film Festival this fall.

Hafaiedh’s film, which has found great success in Tunisian cinemas over the past month, follows the life of a young seamstress named Shams, whose tranquil life unravels when their intersex identity is exposed. Engaged in a steamy love triangle and targeted by an obsessive attacker, Shams escapes to the capital city.

Taking refuge with their lover’s mystic cousin, Shams grapples with their complex sense of self. The evocative tale explores the clash between desire and identity.

In creating “Take My Breath,” Hafaiedh says she aimed to “highlight overlooked struggles and spark discussion about avoided subjects” in her native Tunisia,...

It begins in a prison cell with a despondent Djo (Joumene Limam) scribbling words on paper as Zina (Nour Hajri) implores her to stand so they may leave. Salvation comes in the form of a lawyer (Afef Ben Mahmoud’s Nadia) and doctor (Fatma Ben Saïdane’s Dora) desperate to figure out what has happened and how they were able to return to Tunisia. Details about this question only start to come into focus as Nouri Bouzid’s The Scarecrows progresses with the explanation that the two women were held captive in Syria by Islamist extremists—sex slaves for the soldiers who raped and impregnated them before removing their children. From one prison to another, their homecoming is met by civil animosity declaring them “damaged goods” and terrorists themselves.

Bouzid says that making this film was his opportunity to shed light upon those victims who’ve been walled off and erased from telling their stories.