Nacer Khemir - Les baliseurs du désert / El-haimoune (Wanderers of the Desert)

A young teacher is sent to an isolated village in the Tunisian desert, but instead of devoting himself to teaching the man vanishes in pursuit of enigmas, losing himself in the space and time of the fables and legends of ancient Arab culture. The man falls in love with the local sheikh’s daughter and lets himself be carried away by this world of sand and the Andalusian songs of the baliseurs: wanderers of the desert who spring from the sand and disappear into the sand, tracing an invisible line of separation between reality and dream. In this film magic and reality are blended to celebrate the beauty of the desert.

The first film directed by the storyteller, illustrator and poet Nacer Khemir takes an oral legend as its starting point and turns it into a complex allegory. The director lines up mysteries, deceptions and questions without giving answers, but controls his labyrinthine tale with an unobtrusive incantatory skill, favoring the problem of time over that of space. Plain, bare and elliptical, the Tunisian’s directorial debut pays tribute to the splendor of Arab culture through a studied and painterly composition of the shots and sequences and a screenwriting steeped in poetry.