Mimosas

Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Oliver Laxe’s new film, “Mimosas,” is a “Eastern western” that follows a mysterious caravan carrying a dying sheikh into the Moroccan Atlas Mountains.

Mimosas

• On Friday, April 14 at 7 pm and 9 pm.
• Directed by Oliver Laxe Morocco, Spain / France, 2016, 93 minutes. View trailer.

Somewhere in the desert, a caravan is escorting an elderly sheik to the village where he was born. His last wish is to be buried with his loved ones. But death does not wait. Without their leader, the company grows fearful. And at the foot of a mountain pass, they refuse to continue, entrusting the body to two men who agree to carry on and bring it to its final destination. But who are these men? And do they really know the way? Meanwhile, in another world, a mysterious young man is chosen to find the caravan.

Laxe’s previous film, You are all captains (2010), established his ability to blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and to conjure up and counterpoise differing levels of reality. Mimosas finds him developing this approach in an even more radical fashion, resulting in a film that achieves an extraordinary degree of open-endedness and ambiguity. Richly suggestive and profoundly hypnotic, the film is a head-scratcher whose meanings remain elusive even as its imagery and structural gambits lodge deeply in your mind.

Spellbinding in its beauty, imbuing both the physical and metaphysical quest at its center with a sense of awe and wonder, but also duty and dignity. Uncannily echoing Biblical sagas and westerns classic and revisionist (along with hints of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala and even Van Sant’s Gerry), Laxe deftly maintains his film’s many enigmas, the work’s near-parabolic form suggesting life’s diverse and mystical paths, the measures of belief, and the potential for encounters with the divine.

—Andréa Picard, Toronto International Film Festival

Ben Rivers’s The sky Trembles and the Land is afraid and The two eyes are not brothers will also be screened on April 15 and 16 at 4:30 pm. This unsettling yet visually exquisite film was shot during the filming of Mimosas, and features Oliver Laxe himself in the central role.