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21 November
This film was screened in a special session on Saturday 16 November 2013 at Aldeburgh Documentary Festival
* Contains spoilers *
This is a review of Rafea (2012)
Rafea is not quite the star of this film, because there is also the other solar engineer, her relative, Umm Badr (not mentioned in the IMDb summary) – both sent as ambassadors from Jordan to Barefoot College in India to bring back the technology and knowhow to introduce producing electricity from solar resources.
If it had been a straightforward ride, it would just, as series producer* Nick Fraser said after the film that he did not want it to be, have been about transistors and the work of the college, but, although selected to go, Rafea faces opposition from her family, principally her mother and her husband (he has two wives, and she is the second), who do not easily give their blessing for her to be in India for six months.
Rafea has to leave her four children to the trust of their grandmother (who was a bit abrupt, but some in the audience did not laugh in a kind way) and in the hope that their father will, for once, spend some time with them. We see all this from very close, because another trust has been established in the period of two years (all in all) that it took to make this film, that between the families and the film-makers, Mona Eldaief and Jehane Noujaim.
When Fraser talked afterwards in conversation with Mary Ann Sieghart, he explained how the two had worked with Rafea’s family, because she and the audience were quite curious to know how Rafea had been found, and whether her story had been shot in parallel with that of other women (it had not) :
Shooting with a very small team helped, he thought, for people to forget that the camera was there, although the opposite view was expressed by a director in the audience, that bringing a deliberately large team into someone’s living-room and rearranging the furniture could also work to focus on him or her being open and direct.
There was no doubt that, when Rafea’s husband has pestered her when she is away and claimed that her daughter is sick, he feels absolutely free to express his views when she flies back. Before she went, the danger was that he would do as he said, divorce her and take away the children, throwing her onto the dilemma whether she wanted to continue the same life, or take the opportunity, and risk her husband doing as threatened.
The Minister of the Environment (?) has sought for all this to happen as a pilot project, and his interaction with Rafea’s family is interesting at all levels – not only that he has confidence in the women (in a male-oriented world) and that they will return and spread their knowledge in their homeland (rather than being drawn to the city), but also in the level of excessive civility in the dialogue between Rafea’s husband and him when she visits his office to talk about the problems.
The place in which the Jordanian two study gives them scope for mixing with women from other nations and cultures, both building up a good relationship in the classroom, and socializing. Abu Badr, who has accompanied his wife on the trip, shows himself to have a love of dancing, and Rafea and his wife enjoy themselves, and, elsewhere, Umm Badr shows herself to be a wit of an eccentric kind.
They do not know what things will be like when they return, and some of what they have learnt is neatly reserved to show us when they do, but they throw themselves into the work of study. Umm Badr, not to be thrown in the shadow because illiterate, even determines that she is able to write and starts making marks in a notebook, much to Rafea’s amusement.
The film is heartfelt at a genuine level, and was immensely well received at Aldeburgh, both in itself, and – as the discussion widened out – as an example of what Fraser has been doing with Storyville. He is a man who just does not believe in some things about what films do, and is sceptical what films like this can achieve in changing attitudes at some levels, e.g. (as I understood his point) to have some power to educate by example, but he was clear to state his views and that he was not seeking an argument by it.
End-notes
* The series is ‘Why Poverty ?’ (a title that Fraser did not like), as part of BBC’s Storyville, for which he is editor.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
