Mimosas

The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2016, Ben Rivers), shown at IFFR last year, gave a preview of the setting of Mimosas, Oliver Laxe’s second film. With cast and crew he braved the privations of the rugged Atlas mountains in Morocco to shoot a spiritual Western telling the story of a caravan en route to the ancient city of Sijilmasa, where a dying sheikh wishes to be buried. But death waits for no man, and his retinue, terrified by the impenetrable mountain passes, abandons him. Only the two villains Ahmed and Said feel obliged to grant the sheikh his dying wish.
Like a prophetic saviour from a parallel, more contemporary world, Shakib (played with irresistible inscrutability by Shakib ben Omar) is chosen to help them on the hazardous undertaking. A stunningly beautiful travelogue and landscape study, but above all an exciting, mysterious parable about the elusive power of faith, knowledge and fate.