La plage des enfants perdus

With La plage des enfants perdus Jillali Ferhati has made a small, moving and original film (in which his sister Souad plays the leading role) set in a small Moroccan coastal village. It is a microcosm in which tradition restricts everything and women in particular have hardly any freedom of movement.The protagonist is Mina, a young woman, still a girl really. She is pregnant from a taxi-driver who has deserted her. During a quarrel she half-accidentally kills her unfaithful lover. She buries the body under a pile of stones on the beach. Her youth comes to an abrupt end, she will never again play with the children on the beach and her family will face a major scandal. To prevent the scandal, Mina is locked up in the house by her father. The idea is that others should believe she is travelling. Mina’s stepmother acts as if she is pregnant. Mina is subjected to all the humiliation conceivable in a traditional society.La plage des enfants perdus is a very visual feature film (Variety: `Spectacular pictorial views’) with an intriguing mixture of realism and more expressive, fantastic images. Jillali Ferhati is attached to the authenticity, the veracity,of his images. He shot the film entirely on location and worked with a cast made up of both amateurs and professionals (with local inhabitants as extras). But Ferhati also used some very alienating almost surrealistic camera-work and some supporting roles which verge on the absurd. For instance there is a religious fanatic who is carried round in a wheelbarrow and declaims his `wisdom’ left and right.