Within the framework of the Country Focus: Tunisia and on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its premiere, tomorrow Thursday at 7 pm Casa Árabe de Madrid will show the film Bab ‘Aziz. El sabio sufí. After the screening there will be a colloquium with its director, Nacer Khemir.
The entries are numbered and can be purchased at this link. The projection in original version subtitled in Spanish (VOSE). Colloquium in French with consecutive interpretation.
Two lost silhouettes in an ocean of sand: the young Ishtar and Bab Aziz, her elderly blind grandfather. Their destination is the great gathering of dervishes which takes place once every thirty years. But to find the place where this meeting is held you must have faith and know how to listen to the infinite silence of the desert. The grandfather entertains his granddaughter by telling her stories, like the one of the prince who gets lost in the desert and becomes a dervish after contemplating his soul in the water. Grandfather and granddaughter will meet fellow travellers such as Osman, who suffers from seeing a beautiful woman he once met at the bottom of a well; Zaid, whose singing restored her to lost beauty; or a prince who changed his kingdom for spiritual peace. The film is based on the Sufi mystic Ebrahim Adham.
In the subsequent meeting, the director, Nacer Khemir, will talk with Karim Hauser, coordinator of Cultura de Casa Árabe. The colloquium can be watched live on the Casa Árabe YouTube channel.
Nacer Khemir (Korba, Tunisia, 1948) has worked as a sculptor, an oral narrator and a poet, although his best known work is that of a film director. In 1966, at the age of 18, he received a UNESCO scholarship to study cinema in Paris. In 1975 he finished his first film, L’Histoire du pays du Bon Dieu. His first feature film, Les baliseurs du désert (The vagabonds of the desert) (1984), was internationally acclaimed. Khemir’s second feature film, Le collier perdu de la colombe (The Lost Necklace of the Dove), premiered in 1991 and received several awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. These last two films are considered to be the first two parts of a Desert Trilogy. The third part, Bab’Aziz: le prince qui contemplait son âme (Bab’Aziz: the prince who contemplated his soul) premiered in 2005.
