shots.net: Michael Haussman's Moroccan muse
Inspired by Paul Bowles' novel The Sheltering Sky and director
Michael Haussman's meeting with the author nearly 25 years earlier, this hypnotic filmJourney Never Endsis a kaleidoscope of arresting images that conjure the restless spirit of the country he calls his "muse in ways unexplained, and my guide into the perpetual unknown."
The film follows the director's odyssey from Tangier – where he met Bowles – across the Riff mountains, through Fez, to the Sahara Desert. Bowles had explained to him at the time: "Morocco is about movement—not arriving at any certain place at any certain moment. The journey is the experience."
"More than twenty-five years later," says Haussman, "I set out to retrace my original path, to see if the magic of the experience was still there. This is the film. We filmed as we journeyed and recorded what we experienced. Every situation is real. The people are real. Most things had not changed. Morocco has a great way of moving forward in time while ignoring modernisation as a passing fad or simply interpreting it with its own inventive sense of humour."
