“Although the film cannot be simply categorised as working-class cinema - it is, after all, a commercial film intended primarily for a comparatively bourgeois international audience and international festivals - it is not bourgeois either. It clearly centres on the perspective of the urban, struggling poor, and it successfully imposes this viewpoint, rather than making a plea for it. The viewer is encouraged to empathise with Ali, but Ali is not rehabilitated for the bourgeois eye.” A man whose burning anger suggests little has changed for ordinary Tunisians
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51