Lettres d'Amour en Somalie (1981)

Genres - Historical Film  |   Run Time - 100 min.  |   Countries - France  |   MPAA Rating - NR
  • AllMovie Rating
  • User Ratings (0)
  • Your Rating

Share on

Synopsis by Eleanor Mannikka

In this pretentious attempt to combine documentary scenes of Somalia's past and present economic and human tragedies with a highly personalized, private monologue, director and writer Frederic Mitterrand (nephew of François Mitterrand) becomes too self-absorbed and overly sentimental to pull off the experiment. Beginning with scenes of an unmade, empty bed, the narration reveals that a lover has just split for good, yet an assignment to cover events in Somalia has to continue. Those "events" include on-going starvation and disease, refugee camps filled with the human detritus of desert warfare, and interviews with Somali militarists -- raising the issue of exactly what type of personal narration could ever successfully play off the somber and depressing Somalian conflicts -- the very concept itself seems doomed from the beginning.

Characteristics

Keywords

against-all-odds, military, poverty, tyrant