Date: June 18, 2010

Venue: the New Jersey International Film Festivalsm Summer 2010

The Hand of Fatima is a feature-length documentary structured by two parallel journeys to the remote Moroccan village of Jajouka, where a hereditary band plays music older than history.

The first journey begins in the 1960s, when critic Robert Palmer uncovers “cryptic allusions” to Jajouka in the novels of William Burroughs. On assignment for Rolling Stone in 1971, Palmer finds the place where the musicians spend their days smoking kif, playing music, and “driving possessed tribesmen into mass Dionysian frenzies.”

In 2006, filmmaker Augusta Palmer makes her own pilgrimage to the village after inheriting the Moroccan necklace her father wore as an emblem of his connection with the Master Musicians. Read more.

About the New Jersey International Festival and the screening schedule.