Loving Wallada

Directed by Nacer Khemir

Wallada, the only child of one of the last Umayyad caliphs, al-Mustakfi murdered in 1025, asserted herself throughout the 11th century as both a poetess and a free woman. The first European woman to hold a literary salon, she surrounded herself with the artistic and the cultured elite of Cordoba of the time. The film is both the portrait of this century, with its contrasts that saw both Ibn Hazm, author of ‘Tawk al-Hamama’, a manuscript on love and lovers, and the rise of the Andalusian poetry and chant, passing through the influence of Ziryab’s school on music, fashion, fragrance and the formation of a refined elite that eventually spread all over al-Andalus and beyond. The film also tells Wallada and the great poet Ibn Zaydun’s unhappy love story, while evocating the civil war and the fall of the Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus.