Morocco

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Miloud is a barber in Darb el-Soltane, an old proletarian neighborhood in Casablanca, who struggles to maintain a semblance of dignity. Life has dealt his friend Hmida hard knocks. A countryside boy who moved to the city after his father repudiated him, he turned to petty larceny to survive, for which he served a sentence in prison. Hmida is jobless yet boisterous, while Miloud is skittish and disheartened by his friend’s objectionable activities. When a wealthy entrepreneur who wields power in the neighborhood manages to evict the barber and his wife from the shop to build a centre for Koranic instruction, Hmida incites his friend to fight back. Deemed one of Moroccan cinema’s underrated masterpieces, Hallaq Darb al-Fuqara’ is infused with disarming realist grit. Adapted from a play by Youssef Fadel, a celebrated playwright, novelist and screenwriter who hailed from Darb el-Soltane and was imprisoned for his play “The War”, the film was Mohamed Reggab’s only narrative feature. He incurred so much debt to finance the production that he even spent time in prison.Read More »

An investigative reporter becomes entangled in deadly intrigue when she is assigned to get the story of the presidential candidate, and her job is complicated by a string of political assassinations and attempts.Read More »

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Set in a small village in the Moroccan countryside, Alyam, Alyam tells a story culled from the lived reality of young men almost forty years ago while still remaining very much of the present day. A young man named Abdelwahed pins his dreams of a better life for himself and his family on travelling to France and finding work there. As the eldest of eight children, he becomes the principal caretaker and breadwinner for his family after his father passes away. He fills out forms and waits for his work permit to arrive. Meanwhile, Hlima, his recently widowed mother who’s reticent to let him go, tries in vain to dissuade him and enlists the help of Abdelwahed’s grandfather too. As the days flow by to the cadence of life in the countryside, marked by the hardships of farming, Abdelwahed waits. All he can do is wait. Straddling fiction and documentary, Alyam, Alyam is Ahmed El Maanouni’s first narrative feature, and the first Moroccan film ever to be selected at the Cannes Film Festival. Recently restored, the film’s splendor and finely crafted editing has become available once again for cinéphiles and new generations to discover.Read More »

This film, the first in what has become a semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, follows the everyday experiences of Mohamed-Larbi Salmi against the changing Moroccan society. In 1950s Tangier, Larbi Salmi is a young, timid, pre-teen, boy, trying to make sense of the gentle religious upbringing of his father, the secular education offered him in French school, and his budding desires for the forbidden pleasures of the cinema and the women he meets through it. All the while the film offers a tapestry of fifties Tangier, an international zone marked by the influence of Arab, Berber, European and American histories. ‘This film is dedicated,’ Smihi has stated, ‘to all those in the Arab world who cry out, “long live our freedom, all of our freedoms.”’Read More »

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In 1992, Nabil Ayouch directed Les Pierres bleues du désert, a first short film with Jamel Debbouze which tells the history of a convinced young man that there are large blue stones in the desert.Read More »

It is the holy month of Ramadan in Morocco in 1981. Amina, accompanied with her seven years old son Mehdi, come to live with her father-in-law Ahmed in a small village in Morocco, after her husband was arrested for political reasons. The arrest of the father must stay a secret for Mehdi who was told that his father traveled to France for work.Read More »

La falaise is the first short film by Faouzi Bensaïdi, a Moroccan director who has continued, after this first success already showing his special leg, with Trajet and Le mur , then feature films, including A Thousand Months , noticed at Cannes, and the last one. date, Volubilis . This film, in theaters at the moment, reveals, like La falaise , the director’s interest and concern for his country, for his pains and his peculiarities. In both works, there is an important social dimension and an exacerbated dramatic sense.Read More »

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Abla runs a modest local bakery from her home in Casablanca where she lives alone with her 8-year-old daughter, Warda. When Samia, a young pregnant woman knocks on their door, Abla is far from imagining that her life will change forever.Read More »

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In the Moroccan desert night dilutes forms and silence slides through sand. Dawn starts then to draw silhouettes of dunes while motionless figures punctuate landscape. From night´s abstraction, light returns its dimension to space and their volume to bodies. Stillness concentrates gaze and duration densify it. The adhan -muslim call to pray- sounds and immobility, that was condensing, begins to irradiate. And now the bodies are those which dissolves into the desert.Read More »