A rope stretched between two buildings. A child learning to walk it. An Italian village that watches, half in admiration, half in fear. Zahra Mackaoui’s La Fune operates entirely through metaphor — the tightrope as immigration, as integration, as the precarious balance between two cultures that the child of immigrants must maintain every day.
Mackaoui, an Italian filmmaker of Moroccan descent, shot La Fune in a small village in southern Italy where the arrival of North African families had shifted the demographic balance in ways that provoked both curiosity and anxiety. The film neither dramatizes nor resolves this tension. It simply observes — with a patience that recalls Italian neorealism — the way a community watches someone do something they themselves would never attempt.
The Tightrope as Metaphor
The central image is devastatingly precise. The rope is taut but not rigid; it sways with each step; it requires constant adjustment. The child — played by a local boy with no acting experience — moves with the concentration of someone for whom falling is not an abstraction. Below, the village watches: some willing the child forward, others waiting for the fall.
At twelve minutes, La Fune does not overstay its welcome. Mackaoui trusts her image and her audience, allowing the metaphor to do its work without explanatory dialogue or heavy-handed symbolism. The film was selected for the EuroMed Café “Another Look” short film program — alongside works like Xavi Sala’s Hiyab — where it was recognized for its elegant visual storytelling and its contribution to the growing body of Mediterranean short cinema made by filmmakers who inhabit the space between cultures.
