The subject of Belgium’s Muslim community is now a contentious one: a matter of jihadism and terrorism on the nightly news. This gentle, insightful documentary from Belgian-Algerian film-maker and journalist Hadja Lahbib takes a different slant, though it forms a different puzzle-piece of the larger picture.
Her film is about older north African-born Muslim women and their experience of life in Belgium. As submissive wives and mothers, they were told to be patient because their reward would be in a better place. But now that their husbands have died and no longer exert their iron control, this grandmother/widow generation is experiencing a piquant new freedom, and a gentle new connection with daughters and granddaughters. (Elsewhere, outside this film’s scope, younger Muslim men have different experiences.)
Lahbib follows a group of them around: one with a driving licence takes a group of friends on a road trip and later they go on a holiday to the US. As one says, in many ways they are as innocent as children. When they visit a church, they blankly contradict one worshipper’s suggestion that Jesus was the son of God; it is not aggressive, just without the cautious secular language of agree-to-differ consensus that liberal westerners acquire. An interesting study.
