Mimosas

It's impossible to watch Oliver Laxe's follow-up to You Are All Captains (2010) without thinking of the brutal treatment he endures in Ben Rivers's The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers (2015) after Laxe storms off the set of Mimosas and finds himself at the mercy of some Reguibat nomads. Yet Laxe's own blend of ethnographic study and dramatic minimalism proves just as perplexingly compelling, as it seemingly shifts between time frames to accompany a Moroccan sheik's funeral caravan through the Atlas Mountains to the medieval city of Sijilmasa. Eccentric mechanic Shakib Ben Omar finds himself in charge of the expedition and he comes to rely on ageing stranger Ahmed El Othemani and his mute daughter Ikram Anzouli to prevent rogues Said Aagli and Ahmed Hammoud from stealing from the deceased. Divided into a prologue and chapters named after the praying postures of an Islamic rakat, this can feel impenetrably dense. But what little plot there is matters less than the correlation between landscape and character that Laxe achieves (in the manner of Werner Herzog and Lisandro Alonso) with 16mm cinematographer Mauro Herce.