Rafea: Solar Mama (2012)

So often, men SUCK... and women are BEAUTIFUL.

Jehane Noujaim is famous for the Egyptian revolution documentary, 'The Square', one of my favourites, I was happy to finally find her earliest work, 'Solar Mama', which she co-directs with Mona Eldaief (who went on to produce ‘The Vow’ docuseries, about the NXIVM cult). 'Solar Mama' invaluably offers insight into a world I knew nothing about.

An NGO chooses 27 uneducated women from remote parts of the world to attend a 6-month training course at the Barefoot College in rural India, where they learn how to solder a circuit board for solar lights.

The unlikely heroine is Rafea Anad, a Bedouin living on a hellish landscape in Jordan near the border with Syria. Her community of 300 is unemployed. She's had 9 children, lives in a tent, has no electricity. She’s second wife to a loser husband who lives with his first wife. Nevertheless, the chauvinistic culture means that he makes her main decisions. If it were a fiction movie, he would be labelled 'The Enemy'. In reality, he's as pathetic as he's an opposer.

It's an interesting scenario juxtaposed with the joy the women, who cannot speak in each other's language, find in each other and self-empowerment.