Hideous Kinky

"London, early seventies: Young Julia (Kate Winslet) decides to give up her bourgeois existence in favor of oriental transcendence and flees from her problems to Morocco. Together with her two adolescent daughters, she enjoys a hippie existence between courage and irresponsibility and in (apparent) freedom in the North African city of Marrakech. Her attempts to find herself as well as a new spirituality are crowned with varying degrees of success, until one day her children introduce her to the local Bilal (Saïd Taghmaoui). The fun-loving street artist finds in the three Englishwomen something of a surrogate family and himself assumes the role of surrogate father or welcome lover. But a chronic lack of money and the children's illnesses force the four to embark on a strenuous and adventurous odyssey through Morocco and - after separating from Bilal - finally to return home. (...)Hideous Kinky mercilessly shows the failure of the (naive) life plan of a young hippie mother, who finally realizes that she cannot impose her own lifestyle on her children at any price. Gillies MacKinnon's melancholic, still underestimated story of a dropout convinces with an excellent quartet of actors and breathtaking images from North Africa. A courageous film with an equally courageous leading actress."

Xenix Cinema

Contributors and additional information:

GB/France 1999
98 min. color. 35 mm. E/d/f
Director: Gillies MacKinnon
Screenplay: Based on a novel by Esther Freud, Billy MacKinnon
Cinematography: John de Borman
Editing: Pia Di Ciaula
Music: John Keane
With: Kate Winslet, Bella Riza, Saïd Taghmaoui


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