Poupées de roseau

Directed by Jillali Ferhati

In this study of the chauvanistic aspects of Moroccan culture, a young woman is forced to marry someone chosen for her (she has no say in the matter), and when he dies after leaving her with three children and his mother to care for, she is hard put to feed them and make ends meet. Her bleak existence is lightened for a moment by a sexual encounter with a stranger - and for that transgression, she will have to face the punishment meted out to women of loose morals. Although the story is set at the end of the 1950s, nothing at all has changed since then in village Morocco or in many other Arab societies, especially those where the fundamentalist movement has gained ascendency.