Love Letters in Somalia

In this pretentious attempt to combine documentary scenes of Somalia's past and present economic and human tragedies with a highly personalized, private monologue, director and writer Frederic Mitterrand (nephew of François Mitterrand) becomes too self-absorbed and overly sentimental to pull off the experiment. Beginning with scenes of an unmade, empty bed, the narration reveals that a lover has just split for good, yet an assignment to cover events in Somalia has to continue. Those "events" include on-going starvation and disease, refugee camps filled with the human detritus of desert warfare, and interviews with Somali militarists -- raising the issue of exactly what type of personal narration could ever successfully play off the somber and depressing Somalian conflicts -- the very concept itself seems doomed from the beginning.