Director in Person We are pleased to welcome director Nacer Khemir, tonight with his masterful Navigators of the Desert, and tomorrow, Sunday, for storytelling at 5:30 p.m. (Al-Ha'imun/a.k.a. Wanderers of the Desert). When Navigators showed at the London Film Festival, John Gillett wrote, "(This) exotic film (has) something of the wit, cruelty and ambiguity of the Arabian Nights. (It) starts off with a young teacher arriving to take over a village school isolated in the shimmering desert°.Legendary figures materialize out of wells and the desert itself, groups of children hurry through a labyrinth of underground corridors, the teacher is whisked away to a mysterious rendezvous°.Khemir shows how legend, tradition and fate hang heavily over this community, and does it through a richly expressive visual style aided by superb color. Especially notable is the way the protagonists are always placed against sun-scorched landscapes in which nothing is quite what it seems, like the marvelous moment when everyone gathers round a ship mysteriously washed up in the desert." Like Mogul miniatures, the story unreels in a spiral pattern, to the strains of an Andalusian chant; it is like a sand storm that, for an instant, borrows the shape of a story.