Shot in rural areas of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal), Naked Spaces leads viewers to some of the most inaccessible parts of the continent: the intimate realm of people's homes, and the ritual dynamics of daily activities and ceremonies. It is a reflection on the interaction of people and their living spaces, showing, as filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha has written, “the startling richness and integrity of a disappearing indigenous architecture.... Every house in this film is at the same time a tool, a sanctuary, and a work of art. It is a fertility-inducing site as well as a means to protect life; and, it is built so as to reflect the harmonious position of the dweller in the universe.” Like the Berkeley-based filmmaker's acclaimed film Reassemblage (PFA, November 1982), Naked Spaces challenges traditional codes of documentary and ethnographic film language; both films are stunningly, meticulously photographed, and edited in such a way as to unsettle the viewer's assumptions as to the nature of documentary truth vs. art. A narration for three voices written by Trinh works with the visuals to “introduce a question into what seems self-evident.”