House in the Fields

The film examines the life of an isolated rural Amazigh community in the south-west region of the High Atlas Mountains. The thousand-year history of the Amazigh in Morocco has been, for the most part, recounted, preserved and transmitted by bards and storytellers in oral form among Tamazight speaking pastoral communities. Tigmi Nigren continues this tradition of transmission, in an audio-visual form, in an attempt to faithfully document and present a portrait of a village and community that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years despite being confronted with the rapidly changing sociopolitical realities of the country at large. The film follows the lives of certain villagers, most specifically two teenage sisters, one who must give up school to prepare for her wedding, and the other who dreams of being a judge. The film is at once a tableau and an intimate portrait of a farming community at the crossroads of change, a portrayal of a vanishing way of life that not only is profoundly defined by the relation between man and nature, but also holds the key to an entire heritage of local dialects and culture. (Venice International Film Festival)