Mille mois

The imagery in "A Thousand Months" has a plaintive found-art beauty that Faouzi Bensaïdi, the director, uses as an elegant contradiction to the deftly woven story lines. This impressively structured melodrama, with daffy, character-revealing comic scenes, takes place in 1981 in a small Moroccan village during Ramadan. Mr. Bensaïdi follows a family - Amina (Nezha Rahil) and her young son, Mehdi (Fouad Labied) - as they arrive and move in with her father-in-law, Ahmed (Mohammed Majd). Mr. Bensaïdi builds up novelistic detail, catching the small changes and the impinging of the Western world on this village at a crucial time for it. - Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times