'I want some paradise in my life, today'

Daniel Nelson

Patience patience Youll go to paradise

Image by Patience patience Youll go to paradise

In Patience, Patience You'll go to Paradise!, the Moroccan Magnificent Six decide to leave their lives of housekeeping and childrearing in Brussels and hit the town.

There’s Tlaitmas, the wise one; Naziha, the elegant one; Mina, the blabbermouth; Hamida, the joker, Rahma, the intellectual; and Tata Milouda, the brave one, and the one whose show they see and helps inspire the happy band to take on further challenges.

Life until now has been quiet: “The five daily prayers and the Thursday market. That’s what my life used to be.”

For others it’s been even quieter: one of their husbands forbade visitors.

”’Patience, patience – you’ll go to paradise’ – that’s what they used to tell me. So I kept quiet.”

With husbands dead or doddery and children grown up, they still have little but patience – and a potential opportunity to push their front door open a fraction.

Encouraged by a daughter, they start learning to read and write French; visit a church (“Where do we pay?”) and stop an interesting theological argument in its tracks by missing a metaphor - “But we’re all children of God”/ “No we’re not”; drive to a chateau for a picnic and an ad hoc fishing lesson.

There’s lots of laughter and excitement and stories to tell of husbands, of what they did when they first arrived in Europe (“I knocked on a shop door and waited to be asked to enter”), of how virtually no-one wore a headscarf back in the day.

The big catalyst comes when they are taken to a poetry slam performance by the Brave One, a woman on a mission – “I want to say this to all women. You have to move on … in order to make your dreams come true. I want some paradise in my life, today.”

The film does not explain how Milouda became such a brazen campaigner (saying, let’s admit it, what most Westerners want to hear – how migrants come to love what we see as the best of our culture: she is made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters). Nor does it explore the lives of the other members of the gang, though there are tantalising glimpses of enormous sadnesses (“My childhood and my youth were taken away from me”), airless family situations, wonderful children, needy husbands.

Milouda goes too far for some of the group, but she’s infectious. More visits follow, to museums, to an opera house, to a statue (“It represents something but what?”)

Then a relationship renewed during a computer class adds a blazing final chapter to their colourful journey, as they decide to raise money for a trip to New York – cue rock music; high jinks with living statues in Times Square; accidental participation in a singing, swaying Baptist congregation; visits to a terrorism memorial and to the UN – where invited to ask a question, they produce one that’s spot on.

This is not a probing film, either of the past or indeed of the present: what do they really think of all they’ve seen? Of their lives? And it’s clear that this is no ordinary group: there are people pushing to make things happen, organising, egging them on.

But it suggests lots of questions, it shows migrants in a different light, it’s a condemnation of patriarchy (not of gender relations in Muslim societies, but in all cultures)- and it’s tremendous fun.

* Patience, Patience You'll go to Paradise! is showing at the Curzon Bloomsbury, The Brunswick, WC1, from 15 until 21 January; £9/£7/£5. Info: info@dochouse.org