Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker

A young girl and an elderly blind man emerge from under the sands of the Iranian desert. They ostensibly were buried by a sandstorm in the night, but for all we know they are born in that moment. They are new growth in the ancient ground of Nacer Khemir’s allegorical odyssey of Sufi mystics trekking through to a conference of dervishes called The Gathering. There are no directions, you just find your way there, and everyone has their own path and their own story.

Khemir, a poet and a painter as well as a filmmaker, is less interested in story than gentleness of being, and he uses the endless, timeless desert landscape to create an existence in which past and present coexist. If you can lose yourself in the weave of crisscrossing stories, it’s a lovely, lazy dream movie of marvelous textures and rhythms. If not, the travelogue through Sufi mysticism doesn’t really go anywhere, but at least the music and dance and cultural storytelling make the journey interesting, if not always compelling.

Grade: B