With the Nomads

With the Nomads opens with an elderly Tuareg man predicting that none of his people will still be living as nomads in fifty years' time. It contemplates the everyday labour of desert nomads with an intimate but unromantic eye. There is no narrator: instead, Tuareg people speak of their hardships, their distaste for city living and the nomad's fierce love of liberty and open spaces. Extraordinary feats break in, too: an invasion of locusts, the castration of an angry adult camel and the inspection of a well bottom by a man dangling from 65-metre ropes. This is not an anthropological study but an individual film-maker's response to the rhythms, dramas and personalities of a family, a way of life and a place.