In het huis van mijn vader
Netherlands,
1997, 68 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
-
Fatima Jebli Ouazzani
- prod
-
Marty de Jong
- scr
-
Fatima Jebli Ouazzani
- cam
-
Maarten Kramer
- editor
-
Jan Hendriks
- source
-
NOS Sales, P.O. Box 26444, 1202 JJ Hilversum, Netherlands. FAX 31-35-677-5318. EMAIL: sales@nos.nl
- gga award
-
Golden Spire, Film & Video: First Person Documentary
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Screened with The Street. Fatima Jebli Ouazzani in person.
OTHER
Fatima Jebli Ouazzani’s film is a courageous, deeply personal reflection on her own family history and her coming of age within the constraints of Moroccan society. At the age of 18 Fatima defied tradition, leaving home and escaping the likelihood of the same kind of oppressive marriage that had plagued the lives of her mother and grandmother. In her father’s view, “A woman leaves home only twice in her life, once to be married and once to be buried.” Fatima has not spoken with him for 16 years. Now 34, unmarried and no longer a virgin, she is still haunted by the world she left behind, which remains unforgiving in its perception of her. In the words of her grandfather, “A deflowered woman is like yesterday’s couscous.” She returns briefly to that world through the experiences of Naïma, a young woman who, unlike Fatima, embraces tradition and returns to Morocco to be married in customary style. Against the breathtaking backdrop of a traditional North African wedding, Ouazzani uncovers family secrets, confronts fundamentalist doctrine and dispels prevailing myths about virginity in a moving and complex portrait of three generations of women and the choices they have made—or were denied—and their struggle to find a voice within the confines of their world.
—Mimi Brody
FACTOID #88
Steve Cochran, the American actor who starred in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1957 SFIFF entry Il Grido, demanded a private screening of the film before it could be shown to Festival audiences so he could ensure that scenes that had been censored in Italy had not been cut from the print. Cochran, who had American distribution rights to the film, got a screening’delaying the film’s 8:30 start time for ticketholders.
