Introduction

Thirteen strangers, men of different ages and social origins, from Switzerland, Quebec, Belgium and France. Some of them are bachelors, others are fathers or even grandfathers. All of them are healthy and have perfectly normal careers. They have gathered at the edge of the Sahara for an exceptional adventure: a 15-day trek under the blazing sun, at the mercy of sand storms and bitterly cold nights — a chance to rethink their lives and their male identity. A physical and emotional quest.

The resulting film makes a clean sweep of clichés about what it means to be a man. Honest and incisive, Desert Wind exposes the participants’ innermost thoughts about their families, their roles as fathers, their relations with women, starting with their mothers, their sexuality. The men reveal what they really think about power, aggressiveness, fear, performance. They tackle these universal themes with a frankness that can be disturbing. Desert Wind contributes to the recent rethinking of men’s role in society, in the wake of Quebec psychoanalyst Guy Corneau’s explorations of masculinity and the rise of feminist values. Men are obliged to perform, and many of them hide behind a manly facade that keeps them from expressing their emotions. They are normally intimate only with women, in relationships that often become fraught with conflict.

But here in the dry, silent desert, a good place for introspection and intimacy, the trekkers have no choice: one by one, they show their true colours. They struggle to express their inner feelings, to put words to a part of themselves that, up to now, they have kept deeply hidden. And filmmaker François Kohler captures it all, from just the right distance. The participants freely voice their masculine anxieties, some of them taboo, in sometimes unsettling moments of intimacy.

Desert Wind is about men who need to be with other men to talk about men’s problems. It is also for women, a film that gives the opposite sex a glimpse of the hidden side that few men spontaneously reveal.

Kohler used two different cameras to film this multifaceted adventure, alternating between the majestic desert and the simple, authentic events of the participants’ daily life.

He recruited Swiss psychotherapist Alexis Burger to take care of the therapeutic side of the adventure. Three years in the making, Desert Wind is both a group-adventure documentary and a true work of creation.