Redux: Tunisia: Hollywood's Back Lot &The Man Behind Tunisia's Film Industry

Tatooine is not just Luke Skywalker’s fictional home in Star Wars, but an actual town on the periphery of the Sahara desert in Tunisia.

Star Wars‘ direction George Lucas choose the town as the shooting location and then similarly adopted the name. The set is still pretty much intact and a famous tourist destination for Star Wars aficionados.

The entire Tatooine scenes, more or less, - including Obi Wan’s home - are shoot in southern Tunisia. And Lucas returned to the country to shoot the Tatooine scene for both Episode I, II, III.

But Star Wars are not the only films to be shot in Tunisia. Part of Steven Spielberg’s Indian Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark have also been shot in the film.

Anyway, all this is by way of introduction to note that Tunisia is now moving behind just being a backdrop location for arid landscape scenes, but is becoming a very professional and world-class and prominent film location with state-of-the-art studios with elaborate set designs at half the price.

Don’t take it from me, just read the report from the Hollywood trade journal Variety:

Hollywood may house more soundstages than anywhere, but then there’s the Tarak Ben Ammar studio system in Tunisia.

Comprising three facilities, with the main one, Empire Studios, housing a large ancient Rome set with its own free-standing first century forum, Ben Ammar has built a unique fully integrated shooting and post-production setup conceived and suitable for international productions of all sizes.

“Baaria” producer Giampaolo Letta recently enthused that he “never saw anything like it,” referring to Tornatore’s meticulous reconstruction of his native Sicilian village at de Ben Arous, including its 400-meter main drag, church, cafe and web of secondary streets. “This six-hectare (14 acres) set is three times as big as the Cinecitta set for Martin Scorsese’s ‘Gangs of New York,’ ” Letta says.

“With our studios and post-production facilities, I can make a movie that would normally cost $60 million for $30 million. It’s still going to look like $60 million on the screen, but we can make it for half that budget,” Ben Ammar says.

The next ambitious Ben Ammar-backed project that will shoot in Tunisia is Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1930s-set Arab epic “Black Thirst,” budgeted at more than $50 million, penned by “The Color Purple” scribe Menno Meyjes and centered around Islam and oil.

“Black Thirst” will shoot in part at Empire studios, which has three air-conditioned soundstages and expert craftsmen. For “Thirst,” the studio’s ancient Rome sets are being converted into an Oriental city.

Ben Ammar certainly knows what Hollywood directors and producers want.

“Certainly the arrival of Lucas and Spielberg in Tunisia positioned me,” he says.

But few decades later, besides excellent facilities and exotic locations at a competitive cost, Ben Ammar has a bit more to bring to the table.

“There’s no independent, integrated group like ours that can tell a director or producer that if their picture is going to cost $40 million, for example, we can put in half the budget ($20 million),” he says.

Redux: The man behind the back lot:

Harvey Weinstein calls him "boss." Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal call him friend.

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He shot to fame distributing Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" in France when many Gallic distributors wouldn't touch it.

Whether sitting on the Mediaset and the Weinstein Co. boards or advising Prince Al Waleed's investments in Mediaset and News Corp., Tunisian-born Tarak Ben Ammar has built a reputation as a big deal broker.

But, after 35 years making films at Tunisia's Carthago Film Studios and 20 at Paris-based Quinta Communications, Ben Ammar is moving from helping others build empires to constructing his own.

The Cannes Festival will see some high-profile moves from him.

Quinta will be introducing Jean-Jacques Annaud's next pic, "Black Thirst," one of Europe's biggest film projects, and launching its Independent Film Division, headed up by former Variety international editor Ali Jaafar, a push to take Arab film production to the next level.

StudioCanal-Tessalit production "Outside the Law," from Rachid Bouchareb, a minority Quinta co-prod, screens in competition.

In 2010, as Hollywood scours for new sources of financing, much is still made of the promise of the Arab world: Think Imagenation Abu Dhabi's revolving development finance for Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald.

But Tunisia's own film industry needs investment rather than the country just serving as a shooting location of established Hollywood studios. The nation needs to do more to invest in local talent as well.