A new solo feature by Elfi Mikesch is something to be eagerly awaited by anyone who knows her work as a cinematographer on the films of Werner Schroeter, Rosa von Praunheim and others; as an avant-garde filmmaker (Hawaii on My Mind, Execution: A Study of Mary, et al); and most recently as co-director with Monika Treut of Seduction: The Cruel Woman. Marocain portrays a long last dialogue between a mother and daughter at the mother's bedside, a psychological drama that is sliced through with recollections whose exotic brilliance (captured in stunning location work in Morocco) brighten the melancholy scene like fireworks in the night. Throughout their lives, mother and daughter have been loving adversaries, attracted and repelled by one another, yet always intensely involved although the mother has lived abroad in North Africa for years. "Sometimes I think she is not my daughter at all," muses the crotchety old woman, but as her story unfolds, the tables surely are turned. The daughter listens in quiet shock to her mother's reflections on a picaresque life in North Africa, for her a country of sensuality and pleasure where she took up with a man thirty-five years her junior after the death of her husband. The daughter, for her part, has come to Morocco not so much to find her mother as to escape her power-and to retrieve the adventurous and glorified story of her illusive father, a Foreign Legionnaire who is the real phantom of the film.