Rafea: Solar Mama

Name: Rafea: Solar Mama
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2012-11-05
Duration: 1 h 15 min
Rating: 7.4
Cast: Rafea Anad, Bunker Roy, Raouf Dabbas

20122012
Not RatedNot Rated
1h 15m

IMDb RATING

7.4/10

136

YOUR RATING

Documentary

Rafea is a Bedouin woman who lives with her four daughters in one of Jordan's poorest desert villages on the Iraqi border. She is given a chance to travel to India to attend the Barefoot Col... Read allRafea is a Bedouin woman who lives with her four daughters in one of Jordan's poorest desert villages on the Iraqi border. She is given a chance to travel to India to attend the Barefoot College, where illiterate grandmothers from around the world are trained in 6 months to be so... Read allRafea is a Bedouin woman who lives with her four daughters in one of Jordan's poorest desert villages on the Iraqi border. She is given a chance to travel to India to attend the Barefoot College, where illiterate grandmothers from around the world are trained in 6 months to be solar engineers. If Rafea succeeds, she will be able to electrify her village, train more en... Read all

IMDb RATING

7.4/10

136

YOUR RATING

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Awards
- 5 wins & 3 nominations

Photos8

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Storyline

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User reviews1

Review

Featured review

7/10

So often, men SUCK

The director is famous for the documentary, 'The Square', one of my favourites, I was happy to finally find her earliest work, 'Solar Mama'. 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, who cannot speak in each other's language, find in each other and empowerment.

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