There is something inevitable about the trajectory of Ali’s life in Lofty Nathan’s sunbleached drama of hopelessness that foreshadows the start of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia in 2011.

Ali (Adam Bessa) is scrappy and persistent, estranged from his family until he learns of the death of his father and is forced into caring for his two sisters. He despises his country where everyone seems corrupt, particularly those with wealth, status and power, like the police who force him to pay a daily bribe for selling petrol without a license. Harka, Wikipedia tells me, is “a military campaign with military, political, or financial (tax-collecting) goals, often a punitive expedition against insurgents.” and a bit of research into the origins of the ‘Arab Spring’ in Tunisia makes it clear that Ali is a version of real-life protestor Mohamed Bouazizi.

Ali has money saved to chance a boat across the Mediterranean Sea but his sense of duty (and some affection at least for his younger sister) puts paid to that dream. We get some unsubtle foreshadowing of his likely fate and the tension ramps up as as his rage becomes incandescent.

Overall there is nothing hugely wrong with this story. It follows expected tropes – men are the protagonists, women need to be saved, the ordinary man is powerless against the system – and tells a story well enough. It felt a bit shallow though, as if it was an outsider‘s view of the very real problems in North Africa (a quick search afterwards shows that Nathan is American). I couldn’t help but think of War Pony where the lived experience of the writers gave us something more than the tropes.

Bar some oddly intrusive and sentimental music, it’s deft enough and lead Bessa is hard to look away from. It feels like a single note though, diminishing a complex theme to a crisis of pride and masculinity. Promising much, it seems unsure of its ending, building to a punch that it then pulls.

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