MAIN EVENTS
16 June 2005
Iniziative (EN) -
Mediterranean Awards
The film "L´Enfant endormì", a Belgian -Moroccan co-production, directed by the Moroccan director Yasmine Kassari, is the winner of the section "Europa, Mediterraneo" of the 7th edition of Napolifilmfestival.
The Mediterranean Award Cinema 2005 also went to the film by Kassari. The jury, composed by the Belgian director Frederic Fonteyne, the director and critic from Spain Javier Rioyo, Italian director Antonietta De Lillo, American critic Nick Vivarelli and the Swedish screenwriter Peter Birro, has assigned the Vesuvio Award to the cinematographic work of Yasmine Kassari by selecting it among the ten films that participated in the special section dedicated to production of the Euro Mediterranean area.
The film, produced in 2004 and already presented in the section Orizzonti at the 61st Venice Film Festival, is set in a desert like region in Morocco.
It narrates the story of Zeinab, a young pregnant woman who catches her husband sneaking away the day after their wedding. Hoping to see him soon again, the women exerts an antic ritual of the rural communities in Morocco: put to sleep the foetus in order to postpone its birth.
The long waiting period will be a pretext for following the mission of alone standing women, dedicated to long and tiring days in the fields to get food for the family. Anyhow, we can see that women, free from the strong grip of a masculine figure, allow themselves to evaluate and decide upon their own lives. Even though in a context where they are still represented as trapped in longstanding traditions, a important process of cultural demystification has begun.