Desert Flower (Wuestenblume)

Bea says: Cecil suggested this film on a whim, and I knew nothing about it save what he told me - that it was about an African model's rise to fame.

It is actually a much darker story than that - the autobiographical story of Waris, it follows her traditional, nomadic childhood in Somalia, her flight across the desert to Mogadishu to escape an arranged marriage to a much older man, and her subsequent arrival in London to work as a maid to the diplomat's family occupying the Somalian embassy. Following the recall of embassy staff due to war in Somalia, Waris ends up living on the streets in London, and befriends Marion, a Topshop employee, ultimately becoming her room mate. Marion helps her get work, and she is "spotted" by a famous photographer while working in a burger joint, and, once she gets through a mine of immigration issues, her career is launched.

However, the film's real subject is female genital mutilation, which happened to Waris when she was 3 years old, and Waris's activitism on the subject during her modelling career.

The film was in some ways a very nostalgic watch for me - the parts set in 1990s London felt very familiar to my own younger life there, living in hostels, going to clubs etc etc. I remembered the fashion of the times, and I remembered, as I watched, iconic shoots of Waris in glossy magazines of the times. I also remembered, very well, the late 1990s issue of Marie Claire on female genital mutilation, which Waris was behind, asking to be interviewed on that subject rather than just on her extraordinary life.

I was not overly keen on the film's ending, which seemed to attempt to tie up too neatly the different threads - life isn't really like that, unfortunately, so it didn't quite ring true, and there were times I really wanted to get under the surface of the story and hear Waris's opinion on the different worlds she occupied during periods covered by the film; the narrative didn't quite go deep enough for me.

However this is a very powerful film, and although the subject matter is difficult to contemplate and watch, the reality is that this practice continues. Near us in the cinema a young headscarved woman sobbed throughout the film, leaving us to wonder - had this happened to her?
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Cecil says: The audience intrigued me first up: I don't think we'd sat among such a diverse set of people since we arrived in this country. There were Latinos next to us; groups of black women; a gay couple in front of us; and then this girl who walked in alone wearing a Muslim headscarf, which she took off for the duration of the film. She did look as though she came from Somalia or Ethiopia and, as Bea says, she was in tears through the majority of the film - it made the film all the more moving.

Beautiful filming (actually in Djibouti - bit dangerous these days in Somalia, I guess) - great opening scenes of the sheep and goats in the arid, rocky mountains.

And wonderful acting from the actress playing Waris: Liya Kedebe. There were also key roles for Timothy Spall (really good as the photographer), Juliet Stephenson (enjoying over-acting her role as the model's agent) ; Sally Hawkins (though she was basically playing the same character as she had in Happy-Go-Lucky), and Meera Syal (who I normally don't like, but who played the landlady very well).

Horrendously powerful scenes of the actual mutilation of this poor 3 year old girl. But then the film became something of a lecture on the subject, ending even with Waris's speech at the UN, which was portrayed as if it was a revelation for the people present. There was something inaccurate about that: I was involved in campaigns against FGM as early as 1995, so a UN audience in 1997 would have been moved, but not actually having their eyes opened in the way the film wanted to portray.

There were other slightly awkward contextual issues: where in London in 1997 would you have found prostitutes hanging out in the street in stockings and suspenders and little else? Punks gathered on street corners with colourful mohawk haircuts were a thing of the past at least 10 years earlier. Makes you wonder whose job it is to point these things out?

Overall, though, a really good film and actually one that I would see again, despite its horrendous subject matter.

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