Here is an arthouse documentary from Morocco that moves at geological speed, demanding every single last shred of your attention. It’s a cinematic essay about the origins of human life, but for me many of the scenes felt too opaque and ponderous to really dig into the ideas.
It begins in the bleak emptiness of the Moroccan desert, where a nomad shepherd called Mohamed describes watching a meteor shower: blue fire lighting up the sky followed by a noise so loud people thought it was an earthquake; the ground beneath him trembled. Mohamed lives in a tent with his family, but his way of life is disappearing. The land is so dry (presumably as a result of climate change) that there is not enough grass for sheep to graze. So Mohamed joins men looking for the debris from the meteorite shower. Director Adnane Baraka uses a contrived technique of having Mohamed and his family speak their innermost thoughts and feelings to each other in a whispery voiceover, like a Terrence Malick movie.
Then it’s over to a Abderrahmane, a scientist in his lab analysing the remains of a bit of space rock from the shower, searching for clues as to the origins of life. He engages a junior colleague in a conversation so dense I came away with only one nugget of fact: a chunk of black rock (it looks like dried out old animal dung) contains dust that might be “older than the sun”.
Then we are back with Mohamed and his search for meteorite debris, and some repetitive bafflingly slow long takes in the desert. The film ends with some arresting (and very Malick-y) shots of what looks like close-up footage of the sun burning. But this is a heavy watch, that worked on me like a cinematic sleeping pill.
• Fragments from Heaven is released on 7 April at the ICA, London
