A Thousand Months 2003

A little boy growing up in Morocco’s Atlas mountains stands at the centre of this panoramic view of village life.

“The imagery in A Thousand Months has a plaintive found-art beauty that Faouzi Bensaïdi, the director, uses as an elegant contradiction to the deftly woven story lines… The film takes place in 1981 in a small Moroccan village during Ramadan, and Mr Bensaïdi follows a family – Amina and her young son, Mehdi – as they arrive and move in with her father-in-law, Ahmed. Mr Bensaïdi builds up novelistic detail, catching the small changes and the impinging of the Western world on this village at a crucial time for it… A Thousand Months at first feels like a look at Mehdi’s life, a tale of what he must endure while growing up, but Mr Bensaïdi smoothly shifts his gaze to other things unfolding in the village… A Thousand Months contains a thousand tones, each playing off the others beautifully.” — Elvis Mitchell, NY Times