A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
June 27, 2011
Original Title:
En ballong til Allah
Alternate Titles:
A Balloon for Allah
Production Countries:
Norway
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
When the Norwegian-Turkish filmmaker Nefise Özkal Lorentzen was little, she used to send letters to Allah by balloon. Now she wants to send a new balloon to change the role of women in the Muslim culture. By following her grandmother's path as a 'sufi', she embarks on a journey to rediscover the Islam of her mother's mother. The film switches between her actual journey and her dreams. She experiences the diversity of Cairo, Istanbul and Oslo by drinking tea with the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi, finding hope and inspiration in the life of the 90-year-old author Gamal al-Banna and meeting a young Salafist. On her journey through the labyrinth, it dawns on Nefise that Islam is not the only place to search, but that there are correlations between the three Abrahamic religion and the oppression of women.
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