Jade是一个被硫酸烧伤的年轻妈妈——她的脸在完成了重建手术之后还是留下了难以消除的疤痕，经历了内心的崩溃和人际关系的破裂后，她采取了比较极端的方式试图挽回曾经正常的生活。

　　华莉丝（莉亚•科贝德 Liya Kebede 饰）出生在索马里的沙漠和母亲过着游牧民族的生活。在三岁时，华莉丝按照索马里习俗就被施以女性割礼。十二岁时父亲为了得到五头骆驼，要将华莉丝嫁给六十岁的老叟。就在出嫁前夜，华莉丝在母亲的默许下，在沙漠中徒步很久投奔摩加迪沙的外祖母,也在外祖母那里获得了去给当时索马里驻英国大使夫人的姨妈作女佣的机会。到英国后不久，索马里爆发战争，旧政府被推翻，华莉丝趁乱再次出逃大使馆而流浪英国街头。　　华莉丝在街头邂逅了收留自己的玛丽莲（莎莉•霍金斯 Sally Hawkins 饰），跟着又在打工的餐厅里遇到伯乐，最终被发掘成为世界名模，并投身于妇女解放事业。　　电影《沙漠之花》是根据出生于索马里的黑人模特华莉丝•迪里的自传畅销书改编。

The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.

电影改编自艾伦娜·费尔兰特的同名小说，讲述了35岁的奥尔加得知丈夫喜欢上别人，抛妻弃子，另谋新欢。她对家庭、生活失去信心。而这时母亲给了她帮助，另一位音乐家邻居也给她带来新的希望……

惊险的海盗夺金故事，浪荡的谐趣，均被波兰斯基凌厉精妙的手法传奇般复活。影片讲述为了抢夺金冠，海盗们与西班牙官员展开了一次又一次的战斗。兜兜转转之间，原来一切又似乎回到了原点。