Nadia El Fani

Nadia El Fani (; born 1960 in Paris), is a French-Tunisian film director, screenwriter and producer. She has primarily directed documentary films about human rights, women's rights, secularism, and criticism of religion.

Biography Career until 2011 Nadia El Fani was born to a French mother and a Tunisian father. Her father Béchir El Fani was one of the leaders of the Tunisian Communist Party after independence. He appeared in her film Ouled Lenine. She is the sister of cinematographer Sofian El Fani.

She began working in cinema as an intern in 1982 in the film Misunderstood by Jerry Schatzberg, shot in Tunisia. Next, she became assistant director and worked with, amongst others, Roman Polanski, Nouri Bouzid, Romain Goupil and Franco Zeffirelli. Thereafter she directed several documentaries, including Ouled Lenine in 2008. In the autumn of 2009, El Fani was diagnosed with breast cancer, and began chemotherapy treatment, causing hair loss.

Neither Allah nor Master controversy El Fani discusses the Neither Allah nor Master controversy at the Secular Conference 2014 in London. The 2011 documentary Neither Allah nor Master (Ni Allah ni Maître, a play on the Ni Dieu ni maître slogan coined by French socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui in 1880), in France released under the title Laïcité, Inch'Allah ! ("Secularism, God willing!"), describes the events leading up to the Tunisian Revolution and those directly following it, focusing on the role of Islam in the public sphere. In the film, El Fani states that the fall of Ben Ali should not only bring about political freedom, but also religious freedom. She defends laïcité (secularism) and warns against the threat of Islamism.

In late April 2011, El Fani was invited by Hannibal TV to discuss her new film on television in a studio with 500 people. She reported that the message of her film was well-understood, and there was no hostility from the audience in the room. Although she confirmed she was an atheist herself, she claimed that Neither Allah nor Master was "not anti-religious", but a defence of separation of religion and state. At the time of the interview, she was bald because she was still undergoing chemotherapy.

An edited shorter version of the interview went viral online shortly after, causing an Islamist backlash. She decided to flee Tunisia and once again return to France to escape persecution and imprisonment.

During the film's premiere in April 2011 in Tunis, dozens of Islamists El Fani was also recovering from her cancer, joking that "The Revolution was the best of the remedies". Although she hoped to return to Tunisia "to live there and finally be free", she was afraid to go and that her passport would be confiscated. In 2013, she co-directed Nos seins, nos armes !, a documentary about the FEMEN movement for France 2.

On 2 June 2017, the six complaints lodged against her in 2011 following the broadcast of her film Neither Allah nor Master were dismissed. In November 2017, she returned to Tunisia to present her film Même pas mal. It was the first time in six years she had been to Tunisia and seen her father, during which the state had banned all her films. In 2013, she won the FESPACO award for Best Feature Documentary for Même Pas Mal.