Trailer
Year
2004
Length
52 min
Director
Bettina Haasen
A Love Apart
An intimate inside-look into Tuareg life and the story of a special wedding.
Coyly she looks into the camera, then lowers her eyes again. Rhaissa laughs. Laughs at what her girlfriend Fatimata says about the man who will become her husband in a matter of days. He’s not particularly handsome, nor does he have an abundance of “Ashek,” or pride. But Rhaissa will marry him anyway. The proposal was made, her parents accepted and so she’s resigned to her fate. One final time she’ll shepherd the goats, sing from the heights of Nigeria’s Aïr Mountians and be a girl.
What will follow are long, calm days and nights in her mother’s tent. The marriage ritual is governed by the unspoken rules of “Takaraket“ which require that she neither speak nor leave the tent until her wedding night. We learn from people close to Rhaissa what she herself can’t say.
The director Bettina Hassen (Between Two Worlds), who has lived for more than three years in the West African desert state of Niger, comes tenderly close to a foreign world again in her second film.
The perspective of a young girl in her cultural context becomes the subject of the film, which shows from a respectable angle a different sense of time, one with its own value system and view of love. A calm, poetic film that lives through the absence of explanatory words and ethnographic outlooks.
Written and directed by
Bettina Haasen
Director of Photography
Marcus Winterbauer
Editing
Michèle Barbin
Sound
Bettina Haasen
Music
Michael Mühlhaus
Producer
Eva Rink
Executive Producers
Christian Beetz
Reinhardt Beetz
Sales & distribution
- Press kit
- Press photos
-
„Just in diesem Moment überraschen uns die aus dem Theaterbereich stammenden jungen Regisseure Hans Block und Moritz Riesewieck mit einem erstaunlichen Dokumentarfilm, der seit Monaten Publikum und Kritik auf den wichtigsten Festivals der Welt elektrisiert. Völlig zu Recht: Es ist, als würden einem die Scheuklappen weggerissen, als sähe man das, was sich seit Jahren direkt vor unseren Augen abspielt, zum ersten Mal unverschleiert... eine fesselnde ,Doku noir' mit höchstem Anspruch...Dieser Film müsste an allen Schulen gezeigt werden.“
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
17.05.2018
