Screening The Divine River and Outlay's Wedding at Heartwood Soundstage

Condensed from 40 hours of footage shot between 2007 and 2012, The Divine River is an exhilarating, hallucinatory,harrowing record of music, ritual, life and landscape along the Niger River—which the Tuareg call Egerew n-Igerewen, or "River of Rivers"— as it winds through Mali and the Republic of Niger.

Traversing 300 miles of this transitional zone between the Sahara and the Savanna, The Divine River is not a linear record of a journey so much as a phantasmagoria of visual associations that create their own emotional topography and chronology, always accompanied by music that blurs the lines between sacred and secular, past and present. Highlights include intimate views of ecstatic dance in the painted houses of the island-dwelling Wogo; the seductive courtship rites and trance vocals of young Wodaabe men; a mesmeric Tuareg and Zarma duet for guitar and molo;Hausa griots enchanting with comsaa strings; Zarma spirit possession ceremonies; and heart-stopping footage of the Dogon mask ritual atop the Bandiagara Escarpment in the village of Endele.

Oulaya’s Wedding features an impressionistic account of love, family, gender roles, and ecstatic music in the Sahara Desert. Director Hisham Mayet captures an intimate portrait of a family of wedding musicians, and their court of extended friends and peripheral misfits, who are giving away their eldest daughter’s hand in marriage. The emotional and logistical maelstrom of a Sahraoui wedding are presented in candid and sincere accounts by the residents, hosts, guests, and artists who make these weddings a foundation of Saharan culture in the city of Dakhla.

Group Doueh, the most beloved family band in the Western Sahara, is the main subject of this documentary. Sublime Frequencies co-founder Hisham Mayet and his team, Doueh’s personal guests, were given unprecedented access to film and recorded the pageantry and stunning music of his daughter’s traditional Sahraoui wedding. The result displays the warmth, humor, and belonging through music in this remote and overlooked region in the midst of a rapidly changing Sahraoui culture. 2017, U.S./Morocco, video, in Arabic with English subtitles, 58 minutes. A discussion with the director Hisham Mayet follows the screening.