French-Tunisian documentary maker Erige Sehiri makes a watchable fiction feature with this shrewd, sympathetic ensemble study, which takes place as promised in the title: over a single working day in a fig tree orchard in Kesra, north-western Tunisia. Every day a truck comes to pick up a crowd of people doing cash-in-hand work picking the fruit: largely women, young and old, and some men. The long working day unfolds as the shadows shorten, then lengthen and friendships, enmities, generational and political disputes and embryonic and failed love affairs are revealed to us.
The movie is largely improvised and Sehiri appears often to have set up specific situations for two or three characters to work around, so there are some slightly protracted, shapeless, acting-class improv conversations and arguments, and even some improv fighting; sometimes the film loses its narrative traction. But the loose style gives the film an easy and attractive swing and there are times when it looks very real: the moment when the dilapidated tailgate falls off the back of the truck was surely authentic.
The key relationship is that between Fidé (Fidé Fdhili) a young female worker and her boss. Instead of clambering into the back of the truck with all the others she gets to ride up front with him and doesn’t care about the gossip. With that single gesture, Sehiri encapsulates the sexual politics: women are compelled to choose between sisterly solidarity and what compromised prestige and advantage they can gain through a relationship with a man.
Sehiri was reportedly inspired by the light-hearted “Marivaudage”, the bantering dialogue found in the work of 18th-century author Pierre de Marivaux, an inspiration she shares with another French-Tunisian director, Abdellatif Kechiche, whose 2003 film Games of Love and Chance is about teenagers rehearsing Marivaux’s play of the same name.
• Under the Fig Trees is released on 19 May in UK and Irish cinemas.
