Really Surprised!

It is a performances centric movie

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

This films is one of the worst examples of people forgetting that when you point one finger at something, three fingers points back at you...Sure I find circumcision disgusting too, and it is good that the story is told.BUT telling the story using a women sick with underweight like a KZ prisoner, claiming her looks as pretty, sort of destroys the whole project...OTHER cultures attacks of the female body to suit its ideals we shall see as disgusting, but OUR cultures ideals suppressing females by malnutrition are tooted as positive....Embarrassing that this obvious dilemma is completely ignored, how blind of our own faults can anyone get? Double standards at its worst?

"Desert Flower" is based on the life of Waris Dirie (Liya Kebede) who was born into a Somalian desert tribe, then ran away from an arranged marriage as a young teen and made her way to London, where she became a world-famous supermodel. As a child, she was circumcised, as is the custom in many African countries. An old woman in the desert cut away those parts that could someday allow her to feel sexual pleasure.When Waris was sold as a young teenager to an old man who already had three wives, she simply left one day, walking hundreds of miles across desert and scrub land to seek her grandmother in Mogadishu. Amazingly, she found her — and was hired by an aunt in London to work as a maid. The film cuts between her experiences as a young girl and what happened in London, where she ran away, lived on the streets and were befriended by a ditz shop girl named Marylin (Sally Hawkins).It is while sweeping floors and cleaning slop at a McDonalds that she's spotted by fashion photographer Terry Donaldson (Timoty Spell). Donaldson saw something in the bone structure of the cleaning lady that convinced him to give her his card. Waris was all worried trying to be model, but thankfully Marylin knows her fashion and persuades her, several months later, to pop round and see him. She's soon on her way."Desert Flower" is an important movie, and a great one for all African women to see. Dirie's life-story is inspiring for me, her experiences as young girl are tragic, and her ability to speak out against a custom that has long been hidden is impressive. The film certainly has an important message. The scenes that will remain in the memory long after the film concludes are those dealing with Waris' circumcision, particularly an excruciating sequence in which I watch her three year old face as the procedure is performed. It's an angry, damning indictment of a barbaric process. Which I wish it will stop.

A young Somali girl is at the center of this film, based on a real story. Waris, a young shepherdess, lives with her nomad family tending to the herd, camping everywhere in an inhospitable landscape. The family is dominated by a matriarch, as we seldom see the father. Waris, who is a teenager as this tale begins, is horrified when she is sold to an older man with three wives. The only solution is to run away from that situation. The best thing is to find her grandmother in Mogadishu, a trek that will take her days across the arid countryside.In flashbacks we get to know Waris best kept secret. She had the indignity of having been circumcised at the tender age of three by an older woman, who performs the ritual that mutilates women's vaginae, rendering her unable to feel, or have any pleasure during intercourse. In fact, the barbaric act kills a lot young girls who bleed to death by the way they are cut. Through ignorance this practice is done in a lot of countries. Waris is not the only one, but she had the courage to speak publicly about it and create an outrage as she presented her case in the United Nations.Waris Dirie ended up in London as a teenager brought to work at the Somali embassy as a maid. When war broke in her native country, she had to fend for herself. Through a kind soul, who took pity on her, Waris was able to make something out of herself. A lucky break came in the way of a photographer that realized her potential and she rose to the ranks of super model because of her beauty and talent, which in a way, plays as a Cinderella story in comparison to the hard life she endured as a child.Directed by Sherry Horman, the film has two narratives. Waris' life in Africa, and her meteoric ascent into becoming a fashion model. The best part of the film is the first one because it is more realistic, with a clear message about a fact that has been played in the press from time to time, but whose practice continue to maim young females throughout the world by men hating women and subjecting them to a barbaric procedure that kills a large number of young females, as was the case of two of Waris' sisters. The London part of the story is more artificial, when compared with the more real African narrative.Soraya Omar-Scego, the young actress that plays Waris is quite compelling in her determination to leave behind family to look for a better life. Liya Kebede is the adult Waris. A ravishing beauty, no doubt, a successful model herself, she seems credible. Wonderful Sally Hawkins is seen as Marilyn, the English woman who befriended Waris and took her under her wing. Timothy Spall, Juliet Stevenson, Craig Parkinson, Meera Syal, are seen in supporting roles.

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