Krista Liebe
Special to The Tribune
The last film of the Williams Lake Film Club might be a sneak preview, but I am sure it will be a blow-out. On Thursday, April 21, we will be screening Desert Flower at the Gibraltar Room at 7 p.m. Back doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Desert Flower is based on the life of Waris Dirie. She was born in 1965 into a nomad family living in Somalia near the border to Ethiopia. At the tender age of three or five she underwent the inhuman procedure of genital mutilation.
According to the United Nations, more than 8,000 girls become victims of this cruelty every day.
At the age of 13 Waris was to marry a man who could have been her grandfather. She fled and made her way through the desert to Mogadishu, where she was kept like a slave in a well-respected family.
Once she made it to London, working as a maid and at McDonalds, she was discovered by the famous British photographer Terence Donovan. That was the beginning of her stellar rise to become one of the best-known models in the world, walking the catwalks in Paris, New York, Berlin, London, and she appeared on the title pages of all the best-known magazines, including Vogue. She even was given a part in a James Bond movie The Living Daylight with Timothy Dalton.
In her early 30s she left modelling and became an activist. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, appointed her as UN special ambassador for the elimination of female genital mutilation. She travelled the world for the UN, participated in conferences, met with presidents, Nobel Prize winners and movie stars, and she still today collects enormous funds for the UN.
In 1997, Waris Dirie’s biography Desert Flower was published in New York. The book became an international best seller, especially in Germany, where it stayed on the Top Ten list for 120 weeks.
Today, more than 11 million copies have been sold worldwide.
She founded the Waris Dirie Foundation in 2002 in Vienna, Austria, where she lives. In 2010, the Foundation was re-named Desert Flower Foundation to reflect the broader approach to addressing female genital mutilation through economic projects in Africa.
The film Desert Flower is a wonder. The cinematography is spectacular. It starts with her life as a shepherd in a loving family, touches on her flight through the desert, the harsh reality in Mogadishu, and then concentrates on her life in London.
The film is heartbreaking, very funny in places, totally engaging, and at the end you only wish that it had not ended so soon. The shooting started in Djbouti and then went to London, Berlin and New York. Waris Dirie is one of the co-producers of this film working with Oscar winning Producer Peter Hermann (Nowhere in Africa).
This is truly filmmaking at its best — taking a great story and transforming it into a great film.
See you Thursday. Then we will also have the new membership forms available as well as the membership cards. They are still only $10 per person from September until April. And we will finish off with a little “social.”
Tihol will make a Bulgarian specialty, Filo pastry filled with leeks and feta, and I will make a German specialty, pig ears. Maybe you will bring something?
