Animals no longer live in nature; they now exist first and foremost on our screens. While each new internet-based encounter with them still feels as surprising and delightful as ever, the obsessive relationship with animal imagery often remains limited to fulfilling our emotional needs—rarely do we question the underlying motives. What exactly in these images never fails to feed our curiosity? What makes us continue to watch sprinting dogs and grooming cats as if we’ve never seen them before?
Mourad Ben Amor’s Bamssi (2024)—a diary film made alongside a pack of animal protagonists—hints that our fascination may sometimes be less about the animals themselves than about the spontaneity and impulsivity that emerge from their most routine gestures. It proves a dizzying audiovisual experience.
The anticipation of a breach, a clash in the state of things—even something as minimal as a dog’s wagging tail or a cat’s pinned-back ears—might be the reason we find ourselves swiping from one video to the next. Perhaps it’s also the reason Ben Amor chose to film around his home in Tunisia, where he lives with the titular canine Bamssi, joined by several cats, dogs, chickens, and sheep—named Saïda, Queen, Princess, Kenza, Wazgha, and Bianco, among others.
Characterised by the animal-like, raw, energetic quality of the digital format he uses, the everyday moments Amor captures from their shared lives give the film a sense of marvel that transcends the simplicity of its form and expression. Amor’s gaze roams around casually, yet always attuned to the movements of the animals and the nature surrounding him. The agency suggested by the verb “directing” doesn’t fully capture his approach to the images, for his camera moves as though the outside world itself is drawing it.
He’s more of an explorer, a wanderer than a director. Olive trees, the endlessly stretching sea, train whistles from the rails, or Bamssi, with his larger-than-life personality, always running a step ahead—all become magnetic forces that pull him and us as viewers along. “I continue to dream of traveling. To take a risk for a future,” we hear him say, addressing a recipient in absentia—namely, his filmmaker cousin Fairuz Ghammam, who lives in Belgium and engages in a dialogue with Mourad throughout the film.
Bamssi is infused with a constant tension between stillness and movement—one we can sense Amor himself struggles with. Like his animal companions, who exist at a perpetual threshold—always just one step away from either strayness or domestic life, moving in and out at their leisure—his vision carries both a need for belonging and a desire for freedom. While the joyful immediacy of the digital format, with all its imperfections, predominantly leans toward the latter, there are moments of stillness that interweave analogue photographs, where the images slow down, stop, and take root in time.
Yet no matter how safe or idyllic a home may seem, how could one remain indifferent to the ever-humming, ever-buzzing outside world? Because life goes on—puppies learn to walk, new kittens are born, clear skies turn jet-black with storm. As time passes, the film displays more and more restlessness, with reports of deaths, massacres, and genocide from Gaza reaching us through television reports.
Unpredictable and spontaneous like its protagonists, Bamssi’s narrative turns the film into a strange, cross-breed creature that epitomises our current audiovisual landscape. The perceptual proximity with which the film positions the ordinary and the extraordinary, or safety and danger, reflects the defining trait of how we look at and experience the world today.
It takes courage to engage with images these days, knowing that there is often just one frame or one click needed to swipe from hope to despair, life to death. But it takes even more courage to live. The poem recited by Ben Amor at the end of the film is a poignant reminder of that. Addressing the camera directly, with Bamssi by his side, this final offering is “an outstretched hand”—inviting us, no matter what, to look, to dream, and to live.
