Press release from the Tunisian Agency for External Communication...

New Star Wars Epic is Latest Blockbuster Filmed in Tunisia, the Hollywood of North Africa

Washington, May 12 / The planet Tatooine, childhood home of Anakin Skywalker, really exists, but not in a galaxy far, far away, and not on a Hollywood backlot. As true Star Wars aficionados know, the mythical planet is in fact southern Tunisia, a prosperous North African nation that has become a favorite for international filmmakers.

Among them is George Lucas, who has gone to Tunisia to film every one of his Star Wars episodes. "When I was searching in 1977 for a place to make the first Star Wars movie," Lucas told a Tunisian newspaper last year, "I found Tunisia the ideal country for filming: beautiful countryside, unique architecture and a very high level of technical sophistication."

After his first experience, he kept returning, usually to film in the rugged Tunisian desert, which, in The Phantom Menace, is the backdrop for the mythical planet called Tatooine. It probably is no coincidence that the southern Tunisian city of Tatouine -- spelled differently but pronounced the same -- is not far away.

George Lucas wasn't the first director to discover Tunisia. Anthony Minghella, director of the Academy Award-winning The English Patient, used Tunisia not only for the film's desert scenes but also for the bustling street scenes of wartime Cairo. Steven Spielberg journeyed to Tunisia to make Raiders of the Lost Ark. Roman Polanski filmed Pirates there. Others, including Terry Jones, in Monty Python's Life of Brian, and Franco Zeffirelli, in Jesus of Nazareth, found Tunisia to be the perfect stand-in for the Holy Land.

Taieb Jellouli, an art director with the Tunisian production company CTV Services, has worked on many of these films, including The Phantom Menace. Jellouli believes that Tunisia's attractiveness to filmmakers is due in large part to the country's rich and varied landscapes. "One can find green European style locations five hours drive from the waterless desert," Jellouli said. "In the early days of Hollywood, this is one of the reasons the film industry appreciated California -- the variety of scenery over a small area and the favorable climate." Jellouli also noted Tunisia's political and social stability as important factors in attracting foreign film companies.

In Tunisia, one can film scenes in deserts, amidst remarkably well-preserved Roman ruins, in exotic Arab markets and in verdant hills. Northern Tunisia even passed as Japan in Frederic Mitterand's film adaptation of Madame Butterfly. The close proximity of such varied vistas saves producers money, as do the relatively inexpensive -- yet highly trained -- Tunisian film technicians.

Indeed, the presence of great foreign film directors has helped to develop a coterie of Tunisian film technicians that is among the most accomplished in the developing world. "Tunisian technicians have learned from the greats," said Jellouli. "This has allowed us to master the latest techniques, such as digital effects."

Jellouli recently finished work on a futuristic dark comedy by French director Cedric Klapisch, for which he and his colleagues at CTV Services recreated an entire Paris neighborhood in the middle of the Tunisian desert. The set was so eerily realistic that visitors, including several foreign diplomats based in Tunis, traveled to the desert location just to see it.

For a nation of fewer than 10 million people, Tunisia also boasts a modern and dynamic film industry of its own, whose roots go back to the 1920s. The country's Carthage International Film Festival, founded in 1966 and held in the ancient city made famous by Hannibal the Great, is the oldest film festival in the developing world. Tunisia's film directors have been surprisingly daring, defying stereotypes about Arab Muslim nations. Ferid Boughedir's Halfaouine, featured at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, offers a humorous look at a boy's sexual awakening, and many of Tunisia's most well known directors are women whose films are decidedly feminist. Moufida Tlatli's Silences of the Palace, a girl's coming-of-age story set in the 1950s, won the "Special Prize" at the 1994 Cannes Festival. Kalthoum Bornaz's Keswa, a film about the comic romantic odyssey of a recently divorced Tunisian woman, also won wide international acclaim.

So when throngs of Americans take their seats May 19 for the premier of the Phantom Menace, they will be joining millions of other filmgoers who have -- perhaps unknowingly -- enjoyed the visual panorama of Tunisia and the accomplishments of its growing film industry.