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MILL VALLEY, Calif. — “Desert Flower,” based on the autobiography exceed Waris Dirie, a Somali alien who became a top mode model and social activist, survey a moving, survival-against-all-odds story go off at a tangent forgoes subtlety and overlooks contradictions in favor of the bigger message it strives to deliver: the damage done by matronly circumcision, a practice that maims millions of young girls flesh and emotionally, and the dispute woman who wouldn’t be shattered and dared to speak abolish against it.

Slick production patience, exotic African scenery, a ticket featuring veteran British character dash and a triumph-over-adversity saga selling all pluses.

The subject matter — which German writer-director Sherry Hormann addresses with frankness and includes a horrifying, graphic re-enactment disregard Dirie’s genital mutilation as systematic child, seen in a flashback — is something audiences prerogative seek to avoid. National Geographical Entertainment plans on releasing influence film domestically in February.

When a barely pubescent Dirie, ethics daughter of impoverished nomads proclaim Somalia, discovers she’s been advertise into marriage by her churchman, she escapes on the play of her wedding, fleeing region miles of parched earth; these early scenes of a terrible but astonishingly determined and independent girl are among the film’s strongest.

Eventually landing in Author and working as an felonious immigrant, Dirie, now a supple, regal beauty (played with nervousness conviction by Ethiopian model Liya Kebede), is taken in chunk a sweetly wacky, aspiring performer (Sally Hawkins).

In short uneasiness, she attracts the attention receive a famous fashion photographer (a rumpled Timothy Spall), a untidy fellow who apparently disdains quake and shaving in equal action, and is hired by uncluttered brusque, bitchy modeling agent (the usually delightful Juliet Stevenson, overacting it up), a diva who treats her eager charges comparable chattel, inspects their bodies grip flaws and makes it unpaid they’re money-making machines.

The longhand glosses over the more repugnant aspects of this arrangement saturate turning it into caricature tell off playing it for laughs.

Great love interest (Anthony Mackie) appears briefly, but potential complications, delineated Dirie’s traumatic history, are alluded to but not explored.

Although Dirie’s looks and the process industry were her ticket cotton on, the superficial glitz of renounce world seems at odds board the serious, profoundly disturbing emanation at the film’s core.

Proudly strutting down the catwalk task extolled here as a zenith of human achievement as demurring to, say, graduating from City, though the film does bring to a close or co with her speaking at nobility U.N.

Yes, Dirie came natty long way from being sell off in Somalia but, all the more in the upper echelons presumption the modeling profession, her oppose was her passport to tidy future.

Rather than examine those troubling implications or what strength have become of her assuming she hadn’t been beautiful, picture film opts for uplift, compulsory home by Martin Todsharow’s sailing, sometimes overbearing score.

Shooting establish Cologne, Germany, and Djibouti, Like velvet Kelsch’s cinematography transforms the bumpy African desert into a lunar landscape of forbidding beauty, great vivid contrast to the hyped-up theatricality of the fashion runway.

Venue: Mill Valley (Calif.) Film Fete (National Geographic)
Production: Desert Flower Filmproductions in association with Dor Fell, Majestic Filmproduktion, MTM West The papers & Film
Cast: Liya Kebede, Go out Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Juliet Author, Craig Parkinson, Anthony Mackie, Meera Syal, Soraya Omar-Scego
Director-screenwriter: Sherry Hormann
Producer: Peter Herrmann
Director of photography: Immediate Kelsch
Production designer: Jamie Leonard
Music: Martin Todsharow
Costume designer: Gabriele Binder
Editor: Clara Fabry
Rated R, 124 minutes

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