The Hand of Fatima is a feature-length documentary structured by two parallel journeys to the remote Moroccan village of Jajouka, where a hereditary band plays music older than history.
The first journey begins in the 1960s, when critic Robert Palmer uncovers “cryptic allusions” to Jajouka in the novels of William Burroughs. On assignment for Rolling Stone in 1971, Palmer finds the place where the musicians spend their days smoking kif, playing music, and “driving possessed tribesmen into mass Dionysian frenzies.”