L’enfant endormi, the sleeping child, follows the lives of the women that the men of the village left behind.1 Halima and Zainib, twins, live with their respectful husbands families and are essentially left trapped in the village in which they reside. All of the men have gone to Spain to “find work” and “make some money to send home,” but naturally they never do. The only contact the women recieve is the occasional VHS tape, but the men stop addressing their wives in the videos and eventually just stop all forms of contact. In their absence the women are now responsible for doing all the “men’s” work on top of the “women’s” work. They tend the infertile lands as best as they could, deal with the animals, wash grains, and take care of their blind elderly grandmother. The men leaving in this movie reminded of the World War I and II era where women needed to take control and support themselves financially, entering the warehouses and workforce. The key difference though is that upon returning home the soldiers wanted the women to retreat back into the private sphere, whereas the men from the rural Maghreb became lazy and disinterested. They were fine to let the women continue to shoulder all the burden and responisbility of working and taking care of their (the men’s) families.
The women in the film intertwine their native language, Tashelhit, with darija. As with everything, Katherine E. Hoffman says “Ultimately, again, the burden returned to women.”2 This is in reference to women being blamed for Tashelhit dying out in some of the rural villages around Morocco, but I feel it is very relevant to this film. Burdens are placed on the womens that they should not have to endure because the men refuse to do it themselves, or as seen in L’enfant endormi, they leave. Hoffman also mentions in We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco that the local women are criticized for preferring to watch Egyptian Arabic films rather than spending sufficient time on substinent tasks, (whatever you would like that to mean) but at the same time they are encouraged not to go to school because it is “conventionally [a] ‘male’ domain.”3
A few months after the men leave Halima discovers that she is pregnant with her absent husband’s child. After much emotional turmoil her husband’s mother convinces her to put the baby to sleep, hence the title of the film. This refers to an old belief that “when a father is absent, a pregnant mother can decide to but the baby she is carrying to sleep and wait for the return of her husband or other more auspicious circumstances to wake the fetus.”4 Kassari, director of L’enfant endormi, strategically left some mysticism about the ritual that puts the baby to sleep because she wanted to highlight “ the situation of these women who have remained alone in the country, facing the absence of their men.”5 Towards the end of the movie Halima discards the talisman that would wake the fetus, directly disobeying her absent husband’s request to wake it up as soon as possible. After the talisman is thrown into the river, a rack focus shot is used to introduce Zaineb’s daughter into the scene. A rack focus shot brings a character from the background into focus, whereas a zoom out would have had both characters in equal focus at a wider angle6. Zainebs daughter finally reaches Halima, with both characters in focus, and is hoisted onto her back, metaphorically exchanging one child for another.
1 L’enfant endormi, directed by Yasmine Kassari (Belgium: Les Films de la Drève, 2005), DVD.
2 Katherine E. Hoffman, We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco (Malden, MA, Oxford, UK, and Carlton, AU: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 57.
3 Katherine E. Hoffman, We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco (Malden, MA, Oxford, UK, and Carlton, AU: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007), 52.
4 Florence Martin, “Yasmine Kassari’s “Burning” Screens: The Sleeping Child (Morocco, 2004)” Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 161-182 .
5 Yasmine Kassari, quoted by Olivier Barlet, “Enfant endormi (L’) Yasmine Kassari” used by Florence Martin, “Yasmine Kassari’s “Burning” Screens: The Sleeping Child (Morocco, 2004)” Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 169.
5 Ed Sikov, “Chapter 3: Mise-En-Scene: Cinematography,” Film Studies: An Introduction, (Chichester, West Sussex, NY: Columbia University Press, 2010), 50-52.
Where the sun sets 