HIDEOUS KINKY was Kate Winslet’s first movie after Titanic. Every other person on the planet saw the epic disaster drama, but its wake didn’t churn up the audience this excellent 1998 film deserved. A beautifully crafted intimate adventure, it barely made a ripple at the box office, a $12,000,000 investment sunk by a gross of just $1,263,000, 185th place for the year. Consider this 98 minutes of buried treasure.

Morocco, 1972. Bound to be bohemian, ‘Julia’ (Kate Winslet, 22) has left stifling conformity in England to seek spiritual enlightenment in one of the acid era’s dropout destinations de jour. Julia’s canny, brave and sincere, but also naïve and impulsive, which would be enough hardiness, humility and hassle for one intrepid seeker, but she’s also brought along her two little girls. The joys and travails they encounter in the kaleidoscope of North African exotica are marked by the eclectic people they meet, spacy fellow wanderers and bemused locals, including ‘Bilal’ (Saïd Taghmaoui, 24), a slightly shady but disarming street performer.

Filmed, naturally enough, in Morocco, mainly in and around Marrakech, adroitly directed by Gillies MacKinnon (The Playboys, Small Faces, Regeneration), with crucial assist from John de Borman as cinematographer. The screenplay by Billy MacKinnon (the director’s brother) was adapted from a 192-page autobiographical novel written by Esther Freud (Sigmund’s granddaughter), her debut as an author. She was four when she and her sister were taken to Morocco by their mum. As she put it  “It left me with a love of adventure, but it wasn’t exciting when my mother ran out of money and had to beg – it was horrible.”

The zeitgeist of the Woodstock generation who hit the trail to make more sense of life gets a picaresque, non-judgmental snapshot in this wonderfully atmospheric memoriam, road-trippy enough to have you dig up that worn copy of James A. Michener’s “The Drifters” and recall “that time we got lost in___”. Her spirited Julia a latter-day cousin to Titanic‘s emblematic survivor ‘Rose’, Winslet’s beguiling open-faced honesty is complimented by the warmth and energy of Taghmaoui, who has one of his best early roles as someone too keen to settle for life as a laborer. Still, their charisma and the colorful backgrounds would not be sufficient if the casting of the children was off. Fortunately, the production was blessed by two remarkable 8-year-old’s in Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan, who hit every note perfectly without a hint of forced precocity. It’s plain these kids are living the adventure of a make-believe movie vacation with as much natural delight and distress as their characters.

The soundtrack arranged by John E. Keane mixes his composing with traditional Moroccan music as well as choice 60s classics like Canned Heat’s “On The Road Again”, your basic hit-the-road-vagabond anthem.

With Pierre Clementi, Sira Stampe, Kevin McKidd and Michelle Fairley.