07 April 2008 […]

San Francisco Chronicle
Reviewed by: Ruthe Stein
A soft, poetic side of the Muslim world is portrayed in “Bab’Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul,” a movie as multifaceted and difficult to follow as its labyrinthine title. There’s nothing wrong with being difficult if there’s a payoff at the end. Screenwriter-director Nacer Khemir provides that with a […]

San Francisco Weekly
Reviewed by: Michael Fox
In the shifting sands of the Middle East, the only constants are faith and fables. They coexisted quite happily before the rise of fundamentalism, and they find a soulful commonality in Nacer Khemir’s nostalgia-tinged Bab’Aziz: The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul. The Tunisian filmmaker has conjured a unique and uniquely […]

San Francisco Bay Guardian
Reviewed by: Jennique Mason
Directed by Nacer Khemir with help from screenwriter Tonino Guerra (L’Avventura [1960], Amarcord [1973]), Bab’Aziz traces the journey of a blind dervish who has taken a vow of poverty and his delightful granddaughter Ishtar. Wandering through the desert in search of a great reunion of dervishes that happens once […]

Gambit Weekly / bestofneworleans.com
Reviewed by: Will Coviello
Director Nacer Khemir’s Bab’Aziz is a fable not about a (conceptually more Westernized) search for meaning, but a quest to have beauty and love revealed, in the sense that they represent spiritual truths to some Islamic mystics. Bab’Aziz is an old, blind dervish accompanied on his trek into the […]

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 […]

Seattle Times
Reviewed by: Ted Fry
The primal tranquillity of shifting sands across the Iranian and Tunisian desert is no mere backdrop to this hypnotic fable of spiritual wisdom. The silken dunes that cocoon, propel or transform the humans and animals crossing their rippled lines are elemental characters with as much significance as the mystical parable they […]

March/April 2008 (Volume 23, Issue 2)
Rana’s Wedding
Typecast, 86 min., in Arabic w/English subtitles, not rated, DVD: $24.99
Hany Abu-Assad’s 2002 Rana’s Wedding is one of the finest films to emerge from the still-young genre of Palestinian cinema. Rana is a 17-year-old facing an impossible situation. Her father, who is leaving Arab East Jerusalem for […]

26 February 2008                                                     For Immediate Release
From award-winning film maker Nacer Khemir, the director of Bab’Aziz - The Prince Who Contemplated His Soul. The first film in Nacer Khemir’s Desert Trilogy, available for the first time on DVD!
Khemir’s first film, Les Baliseurs du Désert (Wanderers of the Desert), was awarded Grand Prix of the Festival […]

26 February 2008                                                     For Immediate Release
From […]