The Colors of Silence

On a handmade set re-creating her Casablanca neighborhood, a young Moroccan filmmaker enlists family and friends to help unearth the troubling lies built into her childhood.

When director Asmae El Moudir finds an old picture postcard of a mountain village among her mother’s belongings, it brings a remarkable story to life. The picture is of Zawia, the village in Morocco that her mother left as a child and never returned to. El Moudir decides to go to this remote place. In Zawia, where time seems to have stood still, she embarks on a quest into her mother’s past, and thereby her own. She connects on a personal level with women and girls in the village; one of the young girls is Oum Elaid. The better El Moudir gets to know her and her family, the more she realizes how different her life would have been if her mother had stayed in the village. What begins as an intimate, personal journey in search of her family’s roots, evolves into a universal story about emancipation, migration, and the human longing to belong to a community.

A young girl recalls the communal Friday family dinners, a time of tradition and airing of diverse opinions. Recalling the history of Morocco and those who tried in earnest to affect change, the experiential nature of the film allows for an interesting perspective on a common story and setting. This film is an allegory of memory: an erratic recollection of shared experiences, feelings, and thoughts that shape a coherent narrative.

Blending extensive family archives with striking and surreal location work, the film retraces the life of Fatimazahra, a young woman born with a rare genetic disorder that made exposure to sunlight deadly. She lived a parallel, nocturnal existence and founded a community known as the Children of the Moon. Following her death in 2023, the group traveled to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to live beneath the polar night, seeking a world where darkness offers safety.

They had taken part in the glorious Green March in 1975. They had wanted to reach the town of Laâyoune. But their journey had stopped at the edge of the town of Tarfaya. 45 years later, they decided to take a trip back in time, during which reminiscences of their experiences resurface.

Laarbi, an old projectionist works in a movie theatre that is isolated in the countryside and is on its way to definite closure. Salman discovers, while arranging the affairs of his grandfather, old pieces of film. This is the trigger that gives him an idea that will transform the future of this Movie theatre...