Director Yasmine Kassari (who won the 2005 Best Director Award at Mar Del Plata Film Festival for the film) has made a film that is commendable for a debut effort from an Arab lady. The film is important because female issues in the Arab world often take a back seat and here is a film on Arab women made by a woman. No wonder it won a grand prize at the Tangiers film festival. Probably the Belgian production quality of the Moroccan co-production aided its success at several lesser-known film festivals as well.
I caught up with the film at the on-going Dubai Film Festival and found the film honest and realistic only in patches. It presents the colorless and empty lives of semi-illiterate women who are left behind in villages by husbands who seek greener economic pastures in Europe (while cursing them in a song!). The women long for male companionship when there are few options for them even in time of sickness. Oppression by a male-dominated society and use of traditional unscientific medicines contrasted with modern birth-control pills are realistically portrayed.
While Director Kassari even elicits commendable performances from her main actors she includes an unrealistic sequence where a school teacher asks small kids about "democracy," which one student innocently thinks has something to do with "bread." However, more incongruous in the film was a television set (if operated by batteries, the film does not indicate such easy access by villagers to consumables such as batteries)showing video films in a village that obviously did not have electricity and resorted to oil lamps in the evening and the semi-illiterate women using a film camera with a felicity that would shock urban dwellers in Morocco or elsewhere. Equally out of place was a totally unwarranted, gratuitous frontal nude sequence shot when a suggestive side-angle could have made the point even better.
Director Kassari had good intentions but as the film progresses the realism gets diluted to a young cineaste's pipe dream where villagers can use film cameras (run by batteries again?) with the same felicity as milking goats! The film is at best notable merely as a commendable film on women from the Arab world-little else. There have been better films from Morocco in recent times--see Mohammad Asli's outstanding debut feature film on urban migration, for instance.
I caught up with the film at the on-going Dubai Film Festival and found the film honest and realistic only in patches. It presents the colorless and empty lives of semi-illiterate women who are left behind in villages by husbands who seek greener economic pastures in Europe (while cursing them in a song!). The women long for male companionship when there are few options for them even in time of sickness. Oppression by a male-dominated society and use of traditional unscientific medicines contrasted with modern birth-control pills are realistically portrayed.
While Director Kassari even elicits commendable performances from her main actors she includes an unrealistic sequence where a school teacher asks small kids about "democracy," which one student innocently thinks has something to do with "bread." However, more incongruous in the film was a television set (if operated by batteries, the film does not indicate such easy access by villagers to consumables such as batteries)showing video films in a village that obviously did not have electricity and resorted to oil lamps in the evening and the semi-illiterate women using a film camera with a felicity that would shock urban dwellers in Morocco or elsewhere. Equally out of place was a totally unwarranted, gratuitous frontal nude sequence shot when a suggestive side-angle could have made the point even better.
Director Kassari had good intentions but as the film progresses the realism gets diluted to a young cineaste's pipe dream where villagers can use film cameras (run by batteries again?) with the same felicity as milking goats! The film is at best notable merely as a commendable film on women from the Arab world-little else. There have been better films from Morocco in recent times--see Mohammad Asli's outstanding debut feature film on urban migration, for instance.
