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• The late critic Robert Palmer

Augusta Palmer’s documentary The Hand of Fatima is many things at once. It’s a detailed biography of her father Robert Palmer, the New York Times popular music critic and Deep Blues author who abandoned her when she was only a month old. It’s also a portrait of the Master Musicians of Jajouka, the 1,300-year-old Sufi brotherhood championed by Beat-era luminaries like William S. Burroughs.

But Palmer’s film begins — charmingly and most unexpectedly — like any proper Disney classic, with the animated image of a big red story book that opens to tell a tragedy-laced fairy tale about a young woman who follows a trail of crumbs from the juke joints of North Mississippi to a secluded Moroccan village looking for home, harmony, and something like a happy ending.

“That’s a pretty fair description,” says Palmer, who briefly attended Rhodes college in the ’80s and holds a PhD in cinema studies from NYU’s Tish School of the Arts.

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