Willamette Week
Reviewed by: Alistair Rockoff

Those who marveled at the epic desert spectacles on display in this summer’s The Fall would do well to check out this poetic little movie from the Tunisian writer-director Nacer Khemir. Like The Fall, Khemir’s film is driven by a precocious moppet’s appetite for stories. Little Ishtar joins her grandfather Bab’Aziz, a blind Sufi mystic, on his religious pilgrimage across the sands. During their journey, he tells her the tale of “the prince who contemplated his soul.” Before he can finish, more fellow travelers drop by and offer their own personal histories of obsession, which weave together into a kind of reverent Arabian version of The Canterbury Tales. Having said he hopes to rehabilitate Islam’s image, the director has captured an ecstasy of devotion—spiritual, familial, erotic. The film moves hypnotically back and forth, from the beauty of a psalmist’s voice to the beauty of silence, from the infinity of the desert to the infinity of the ceiling in a mosque, spinning endlessly in the eyes of a whirling dervish. Occasionally, a bus, motorcycle or airplane intrudes to remind us that we are in modern times, that even now we may find a purity of desire.