A DOOR TO THE SKY (1989, Morocco, 107 min.), written and directed by Farida ben Lyziad; edited by Moufida Tlatli. In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

One believes in the destiny of the planets; their trajectories are calculated for millions of years, but because no one knows how to calculate the trajectory of a human being, one decides that he does not have one. Well, if the human being escapes human understanding, he can't escape the meaning of creation, of his destiny.

from A Door to the Sky

A Door to the Sky opens with some cross-cutting between past and present. At the very opening a man enters his house (deceptively drab on the outside, a stunningly beautiful mansion on the inside, with gorgeous interior courtyard filled with fountains and vegetation). His French (?) wife is learning Islamic prayer from his mother, something that disturbs this obviously Westernized Moroccan. A title comes up, telling us that the film is dedicated to the memory of Fatima Fihra, a woman who in the 10th Century founded one of the world's first universities. We are then brought into the present, where the man is lying on his deathbed, awaiting final visits from his three children.

We first meet his elder daughter, Leyla, who has remained in Fez, living a comfortable middle-class life with her Moroccan husband and children. She has reached a comfortable accommodation between tradition and the modern world, at least as far as her public persona goes--she jogs, but knows when to cover herself. The son, Drissa, has completely turned his back on his heritage. He has moved to France, married a Frenchwoman, and is raising his son as a little Frenchman. The youngest child, Nadia, also left Morocca for France for her studies, and subsequently for love and work. She lives in Paris with her French boyfriend, Jean-Phillippe, a filmmaker. She is somewhat trapped between the worlds of tradition and modernity--when she returns to Fez, she stands out with her punked hairstyle and muscle shirt; yet she still wants to see herself as in touch with her heritage. The children speak French with one another--theirs was obviously a very Western upbringing.

After she visits her father, Nadia goes to her late mother's studio, a room filled with portraits , nudes, and other artwork, presumably done by her mother. There she encounters the portrait of Ba Sassi, a man who used to be part of their household, "a master of magic." We see him in flashback, and we will continue to see him as the film progresses, in visions that Nadia will have.

We learn that the father has died, and Nadia is a wreck, filled with confusion and remorse. Leyla comes to take her to the mourning service, but Nadia prefers to sit in her room and drink. Finally, Nadia agrees to put on traditional mourning garb and go downstairs, where she is immediately seduced by the strange beauty of a woman's voice chanting passages from the Koran. (As Leyla phrases it, the woman's voice is truly a gift from God.) The woman is Kirana, a widow full of religious ardor and powerful sense, who will ultimately lead Nadia down a different path in life.

Nadia had previously rejected religion from her life, seeing it as "the opiate of the masses," and hypocritical power-mongering. Kirana introduces her to a different conception of Islam, an Islam that engages the whole person, that allows the individual to find her own path in life. Nadia is clearly entranced by passages from the Koran such as "The world is like a school. God gave it to us to study, and he gave us the knowledge to choose the right path to follow." Kirana tells Nadia that the young woman is living her life "as if this doubt condemns you to shutting yourself up in a room all alone. The word of Allah is a key to open the door to that room." What she comes to offer Nadia--though it is never named as such--is an embodiment of the Sufi tradition in Islam, the tradition of Al-Ghazzali, of ibn-Arabi, a form of Islam that focuses less on law and external conduct and more on internal experience of religious truth.

Kirana's influence clearly throws Nadia into further turmoil. When her boyfriend arrives from Paris, impatient to see her, she rejects him as a foreigner, cruelly (and probably unfairly) accusing him of being ignorant of her roots, her true identity, as being only interested in her as a piece of ethnography. She says that she no longer wants to live just for money. She wants to follow another path.

Through her conversations with Kirana, she gets the idea of turning the mansion into a zawiyah, or hospice for needy women. This was something that wealthy women in the past apparently would do according to the tradition--use their wealth to help other women. Nadia feels that God is calling her to some higher purpose. Kirana gently rebukes her for her pride, telling her that "all Believers have something to accomplish." Still, she supports Nadia in this plan.

Unfortunately, a major obstacle arises. Her brother, now back in France, decides to sell the house (he has the right, since he owns half and his sisters each own one-fourth). Leyla does not want to sell, but believes they have no choice, and she clearly thinks that Nadia's shelter scheme is crazy. After a vision in which the master of magic from her childhood speaks to her, Nadia goes to visit a lawyer to help keep her brother from selling. There, she clearly articulates her changing beliefs and her goals: "The problem is that we're losing the best of our traditions and only keeping the skeleton of the traditional devoid of any meaning." She sees the shelter as a way to get in touch with the authentic in her heritage.

Thanks to the lawyer's intervention, she gains a reprieve and starts taking women in. The first is a pregnant servant repudiated by Leyla. Then comes a young girl abused by her parents. Then a mad woman, and gradually the house fills up. She even briefly takes in a Westernized young woman fresh from prison. Eventually, thanks to another vision from Ba Sassi, (provoked by a Sufi trance induced by ecstatic music and dance) she figures out a way to save the house (it involves discovering a box of precious jewels).

Over the course of the film, Nadia changes gradually but dramatically. Due to Kirana's influence, and to the influence of the Sufi texts that she reads, her thinking changes. So does her bearing. She becomes gradually more comfortable in her skin. She can put her self-consciousness to rest when she prays and meditates. Though her dress becomes more traditional, she is lovelier than ever. By the end of the film, she will find not only inner peace and purpose, but even love.

A Door to the Sky is a passionate, often beautiful exploration into affairs of the spirit and the intellect by a woman director who is a modernist, an outspoken feminist, yet who is able to make an accommodation with her religion and her tradition by seeking out the deepest, most creative, most humanist , indeed most feminist sources in her tradition. The Islam that she embraces in this film is far removed from the more ascetic, proscriptive Wahabbist strain of Islam, coming from the Gulf, with which many of us are familiar. But it's one that many will find very attractive.

Notes by Michael Dembrow

*Note: Following are the words to a (Sufi?) text that we see at one point in the film:

Non-being is a mirror, the world an image, and man

is the eye of the image in which the person is hidden.

You are the eye of the image, and he the light of the eye

Who has ever seen the eye through which all things are seen?

The world has become a man, and man a world.

There's no clearer explanation than this:

When one looks carefully into the root of the matter, he is

at the same time that which is seen.

The eye that sees and the thing seen.

--Mahmud Shabestar, The Rosary of Mystery

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