Rafea: Solar Mama
What happens when oppressed women are given an opportunity? Something wonderful.
Jehane Noujaim is famous for the documentary, 'The Square', one of my favourites. She had further success with ‘The Great Hack’ and ‘The Vow’ series.
I was happy to finally find her earliest work, 'Solar Mama', wherein she collaborated with Mona Eldaief. It's valuable because it offers an 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, 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, and is 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 find in each other and empowerment.