A Love Apart

She looks shyly into the camera, then lowers her eyes again. Rhaissa laughs. Laughs at what her girlfriend Fatima says about the man who will become her husband in a matter of days. He is 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 is resigned to her fate. One final time she will shepherd the goats, sing from the heights of Nigeria's Aïr Mountains and be a girl. What will follow are long, calm days in her mother's tent. The marriage ritual is governed by the unspoken rules of "Takaret," which require that she neither speak nor leave the tent until her wedding night. We learn from people close to Rhaissa what she herself cannot say. Bettina Haasen (Between Two Worlds), who has lived in the West African desert state of Niger for more than three years, comes very close to a foreign world again in her second film. The perspective of a young girl in her cultural context becomes the subject of this beautiful, warm film, which shows from a discreet angle a different sense of time, one with its own value system and view of love. A calm, poetic film that comes to life through the absence of explanatory words and ethnographical judgements. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)