Hideous Kinky (film)

Hideous Kinky is a 1998 film directed by Gillies MacKinnon, based on Esther Freuds 1992 novel of the same name, about a young English mother Kate Winslet who moves from London to Morocco with her two young daughters. The soundtrack included music by Canned Heat, Richie Havens and the Incredible String Band.

After the girls match their mother with gentle Moroccan acrobat and conman Bilal, sexual gears are set in motion. He eventually moves in with them and serves as a surrogate father. Julias friend Eva urges Julia to study in Algiers with a revered Sufi master at a school of the annihilation of the ego. In another sequence, European dandy Santoni invites Julia and the girls to his villa. As finances dwindle, Bilals philosophy is God will provide, although usually it is Bilal himself who provides. Sometimes he also disappears. At one point Bea contracts a streptococcus infection while he is gone and nearly dies. Bilal returns only to disappear again, but he has a plan. They discover that three return tickets that suddenly appear have been bought by him with money he got from the sale of his uniform. In the end, Julia and the girls board a train back to London.

Source: Wikipedia