Ozr el wezzah

A heavenly inquiry lands in a village to inspect the sleep of a peasant and his renegade goose. Led by the hums of a spectral apparatus, the visitation detects esoteric frequencies from a spiritual reality cloaked in the peasant’s home and land.

On the paths of the village where The Goose’s Excuse unfolds, time seems to be caught in a loop. The repeated entry of two men into the frame is marked by a distorted continuity, and by the strange mismatch between the nearness of the voices and the distance of the bodies in the image. Relying on such paradoxes, the film probes the spiritual life of a community. It first shows the immemorial trance of a Sufi ceremony, then moves into the wings and the electric instruments sustaining it. The sacred and the profane come together and intermingle. The Qur’an is not used simply for waking up but also falling asleep. On television, a man is searching for a woman who has disappeared—“like all the women in the village?”, one might wonder. The male community portrayed seems governed by codes that are beyond our grasp: a cryptic conversation filmed in a low-angle shot, a mass of toy boats with black sails suspended in the air. Unexpectedly changing points of view, the camera appears to be endowed with its own personality, sometimes sitting in the middle of a path eavesdropping on the ongoing conversations, sometimes on a doorstep that it doesn’t dare cross. Sometimes, it even seems to take the place of a spirit appearing to the eyes of a visited person. As in the religious ritual, a vital throbbing resounds elusively and the dead are perpetuated through the living. We are not told what has brought death here, but we can guess how humans have reacted to it since time immemorial.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian