NEEDLING

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MOVIE

Al ouyoune al jaffa, de Narjiss Nejjar
ALLOCINE IMDB

A film set in a Berber village of Morocco. A woman’s been in prison for the last thirty years in Casablanca. She gets out after they close the prison. A man who was a guard in the prison and who has now become a bus driver recognizes her walking down the street. He stops his bus. She gets in, and together they go back to her village Tizit. This is a village of women were the only men allowed are those that come and pay for sexual favors. The man and the old woman are not really welcomed, but they settle in anyway. Behind this village, beyond the valley and up on the side of the mountain there is another village. In this second village lives the old women who are no longer wanted by the men. Their daughters come everyday to bring them wood to burn in the stoves and food to eat. They are the women banned from the rest of the world. The old woman who has spent the last thirty years of her life in prison and has now come back home, it is her daughter who runs the village of prostitutes. There the story begins. It is a beautiful story, heart wrenching. On top of a hill after their first full moon night, the night when the men from the nearby villages climb up the mountain to pay for sex, on the morning after their first time when they’ve given up their virginity and joined the profession of the village and in so doing joined the community of the damned, the young girls barely pubescent go to the entrance of the village and tie a red headscarf to a stick. On top of this hill are hundreds of tall sticks with red scarves tied at the top. The red scarves represent each of their virginity lost, the scarf they should have worn on their wedding night. The movie is beautifully shot. Simply shot. The mixture of Berber and Arab is music to the ear, even though the dialogues are often terrible. Not a dry eye in the theater.