Desert Flower (2009)

Simply Perfect

Expected more

Excellent but underrated film

What begins as a feel-good-human-interest story turns into a mystery, then a tragedy, and ultimately an outrage.

The true story of Waris Dirie, a Somalia girl from a desert region and promised to a miserable local life, who fled to England and eventually became a top model. But the real story, the one that begins the day that changed her life, is another one. Hard and repulsive story, heir of a Somali tradition of 3000 years. A strong and true message, which calls for our humanity. Superb interpretation. Simple direction, valuing the natural interpretation, and decorated with a lot of beautiful film views. Another important point of the message is this distinction between the Somalia tradition and the Coran recommendations. See and support absolutely.

In life (I'm 68) there are only a few films that really 'cut into your soul and plant themselves'. Most of the ones that do this to me are real-life stories.Gandhi,Lawrence of Arabia, one of the early Titanic films (I was about 9 years old I think). Desert Flower,for all it's minor failings as a film (I stress minor) planted itself firmly in my heart and will not depart. It shames my manhood (in a good way). It demands of me a greater tolerance of others and a resistance to methodologies/traditions that limit the full potential of another human being.. It tells an incredible story of an incredible woman with an incredible spirit. . Unimaginably important viewing.

I found this movie to be a handful of stereotypes and clichés about women and womanliness. In effect, aside from a few powerful scenes, the rest of the movie seemed like a never-ending ad for some big fashion firm or an incomprehensible promotion for some anorexic and beautiful actor. If the movie had stopped right at the edge of our Western-world obscenities about fashion, beauty canons and femininity, I could have considered it just an OK movie. But the plot, although real, is unrealistic, and the frames and shots, not to mention the story, are absolutely superficial. The movie probably wants to convey us its rightful disgust for excision practices, yet it prompted my disgust by treating its own main character as mere merchandise, in accordance with some of our Western-world values. I didn't watch the end of the movie because I found insulting the 2/3rds of it. I hope the end makes up for the long and superficial beginning, although I very much doubt it.

An emotional trip of a woman from the desert of Somalia to the United Nations. I will not follow that road which is detailed and marked by exploitation, scarification, mutilation, alienation, rejection, and all other words in that line rhyming with immigration. The film is dealing with one day in the life of an Africa woman that changed that very life into an ordeal. It is called excision and it is performed at the age of three. Beside the direct death rate, and even the indirect death rate (later when pregnant and wanting to deliver the baby) those who survived are made psychologically inferior and dependent. They are not able to control their lives and to develop the energies that would transform the whole African continent. A tradition coming from Black Africa that was later integrated by Islam when it arrived, though Islam was careful not to spread the practice in the population that did not have that tradition, particularly the Arabs. It is nothing but the survival of an enslaving sexual practice that has to disappear from this earth as fast as possible. Yet we are far from it. Excision, and I will say like all other sexual mutilation, is a crime against humanity, including in the US where 95 per cent of males are circumcised. They have even invented a word for natural: uncircumcised and uncut, which is the barbaric bigotry of some turned into lexical tyranny.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID