First contact with the piano at three years old, graduate of the Tunis conservatory at 12, composer of original music at 15: Amine Bouhafa's career reads like a catalogue of precociousness. Yet the Tunisian composer has long alternated between his career as an engineer and his passion for music. It was only in 2012 that he left the multinational he worked for to devote himself fully to composition. He went on to write scores for Egyptian television series such as First Lady (2014), Souleymane Cissé's documentary O Ka (2015) and, notably, Abderrahmane Sissako's feature film Timbuktu.

Although the success of the film led him to work on more symphonic projects such as the ballet Du désir d'horizon (Desire for Horizons) by Salia Sanou at the Théâtre de Chaillot in 2016, he has devoted most of his time to cinema where he has supported young Tunisian directors Kaouther Ben Hania (La Belle et la Meute or Beauty and the Dogs in 2017) and Mehdi M. Barsaoui (Un Fils or A Son in 2020).

A film enthusiast and diligent student, Amine Bouhafa draws elements of his musical style from the sources of Hollywood cinema and the Tunisian music which has surrounded him since childhood. Like other great composers of the 7th art, he first sets out his work like a precise and discreet weaving, designed to serve the film and the director’s vision.

For Timbuktu, Amine Bouhafa mixed the notes of Malian instruments – the kora, the n'goni – with orchestrations of the strings and woodwind instruments from his classical training. The result is a powerful soundtrack that does not seek to emphasise the story, but rather to reveal a new dimension, to express the unspoken.

Similarly, for Le Miracle du Saint Inconnu (The Unknown Saint) by Alaa Eddine Aljem (2020), the composer offers counterpoint music using offbeat instruments and western rhythms to reveal the irony of the film.

Trained in Tunisia, in France where he attended the Académie internationale de musique (International Academy of Music) in Nice, and in the United States (MBA at the University of California), Amine Bouhafa came from an international culture even before starting his career as a composer. He made his name winning three prizes for the film Timbuktu : a César, the FESPACO prize for best music and the France Musique – Sacem prize for film music. This global spotlight does not, however, take him away from his native country, Tunisia, or the eastern world where he does most of his work, from Lebanon (Halal Love by Assad Fouladkar in 2015) to Morocco (Le Miracle du Saint Inconnu or The Unknown Saint).

Amine Bouhafa also does not hesitate to support young film makers making their debuts on the international scene. To this end he composed the music for Tu mourras à 20 ans (You Will Die At 20, 2019), the first film by Sudanese Amjad Abu Alala, which won the Luigi de Laurentiis Award at the 2019 Venice Film Festival.