Set against a parched landscape in southern Syria, Ryad Chaïa's Al-Leja uses an innovative cinematic style to tell the story of Leja, a young woman in a Druze village in the 1940s, who seeks to cut loose from this barren environment and its equally barren paternalistic relationships. Left alone when her husband leaves to work abroad, she pins her hopes on the newly arrived schoolteacher but her relatives, and indeed the whole village, prevent their escape together, and mete out a brutal punishment. "(This film) can be read as a sociopolitical commentary. But there is a powerful visual poetry which functions on its own terms: haunting shots of moonlit courtyards and a woman's stifled longings; a man branding a sheep as the errant Leja tries to escape her fate; a dog and a man howling at the moon on a barren Syrian hilltop. Like a visual ataba (the classic Arabic love poem) the film speaks in a beautiful, mysterious code." (Hadani Ditmars, Sight & Sound)