Arab filmmakers celebrate the absence of fear

This year's uprisings in the Middle East have sparked interest in the Arab Film Festival Berlin, which closes Thursday. Cinema buffs looked for explanations to the Arab Spring, and found a good deal of optimism.Ben Ali wanted to know everything about everyone, down to the last detail," says a protagonist in the Tunisian documentary "No More Fear," which featured this week at the Arab Film Festival Berlin.The Tunisian president's way of finding out everything was to instill fear, to such an extent that friends and family members no longer knew whether they could trust each other. People were arrested on trumped-up charges, accused of being terrorists or of endangering the state.In his film, Mourad Ben Cheikh interviews a number of courageous activists, lawyers, journalists and bloggers who refused to yield to the terror. He juxtaposes the interviews with footage of the heady days of January when Tunisians took to the streets to demand the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his government, and the last televised speeches of the president before he fled the country he'd ruled with an iron fist for over two decades. Renowned Tunisian human rights lawyer Radhia Nasraoui, who defends victims of torture, tells the filmmaker how she would always check that her brakes had not been tampered with when she got into her car. She is defiant as she recalls how she refused to give into intimidation the day her office was broken into and all her files stolen, and how she danced the night away at a wedding, fully aware that the police were watching her.She laughs as she remembers her month-long hunger strike to protest against the detention of her husband, Hamma Hammami, the secretary general of the worker's communist party. He in turn smiles as he looks back on his most recent stint in jail in January when he feared he would be left behind chained to the bed as the guards took to their heels. Although their stories are told with humor, there is a lingering sadness that so many of their activist friends did not live to see the day Ben Ali fell, the day there was "no more fear."