From Tunisia to Finland, what do fairytales transmit on to the little children who listen to them?

The Finnish Tunisian artist Dora Dalila Cheffi draws on traditional Tunisian, Finnish, and Western tales and on her own experience to produce this story. Against contemporary feminist rewritings of our childhood stories, she offers the main character no glorious or emancipatory path forward. The child seems to be a victim of her little girl destiny, as if it were inevitable. She is both the object of and witness to mockery, pressure, and sexist violence enacted by the other women in her family, who are personified as a twelve-headed monster—in Finnish, the kaksitoistapäinen sukulaisjoukko. The end of the story does not suggest a possible liberation: despite being endowed with a superpower, the child, in the grip of loneliness, submits to the law.

Through her kitsch, queer, and childlike aesthetic, the artist appropriates visual elements from children’s TV shows such as Finland’s Pikku Kakkonen. With humor, she tackles the issues of gender-based violence within families, sexism, and the social and familial control of women’s bodies. Dora Dalila Cheffi’s tale has no moral. It does, however, transgress social norms through its narrative and visual universe, focusing our attention on the tenacious reproduction, within the family, of repressive norms that hinder women’s emancipation.

Director, Producer and Writer: Dora Dalila Cheffi
Narrator & Performer: Saban Ramadani
Editor & Sound designer: Lucas Sene
Set Designer: Ansku Heiskanen
Sound recording: Juho Luukkainen
Text Editor in Finnish: Aurora Rämö & Tero Kartastenpää
Text Editor in English: Amina Kaabi
Translator to English: John Kaye
Translator to Arabic: Soumaya Hedhili

With the help of Amanda Palo, Markus Tamminen, Otto Helkama, and Arif Samaletdin.

Forum Box

9.5.-1.6.2025

Tue-Sun 12.00-17.00

Free admission