Games and Children’s Dreams

Drama set in a Moroccan village.

In Morocco, a widely-accepted account fills the air, about three local fishermen who drowned at sea - allegedly after attaining visions of a mysterious woman who beckoned them to their deaths. As director Hakim Belabbes's feature Why, O Sea? opens, this chain of events seems poised to repeat itself in the life of a similar fisherman, Said. Day after day, he journeys into the sea, with his friends, to retrieve his daily catch. For better or worse, Said and his pals are seemingly bound to their occupation for life and enmeshed in crude, centuries-old techniques for plying their trades. When Said - like the unfortunate predecessors - also begins spotting a female presence who appears everywhere, calling ceaselessly to him, his mother grows sick at the thought that this may be a maritime apparition determined to lure him to a watery grave.

As director Hakim Belabbes chronicles his journey from his home in Chicago to visit his family in his hometown of Boujad in Morocco, his exploration of family relationships is self-conscious and at times painfully honest. We witness his most private moments with his family. The film intimately explores the domestic spaces and religious rituals of intra-family relationships, especially when compounded by one member's break with traditional values.

Ali Essafi visited Bouanani three years before the latter’s death. The filmmaker, poet and novelist who also made drawings was leading a reclusive life in a remote village with his wife Naïma and many cats, living in the midst of huge piles of books and manuscripts.

The residents of a small Moroccan city endure separate lives while knowing the same cycles of burden and small joys. Wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters maneuver their way through mourning as death takes loved ones and life insists on moving forward. Here, letting go is a challenge for both the dead and the living. The people of this city share the same world, but don't always know when they live in each other's lives, helping and harming each other. Connected by friendship, proximity, and blood, they both destroy and support each other. Through weddings, funerals, murders, forgiveness, love, new birth, and sacrifice, the living build community and hope. Meanwhile, the souls of the dead linger to watch over loved ones.

Caught between chasing his past and accepting his impending end, a man follows his childhood memories through the dark alleyways and desolate cemeteries of Boujad, Morocco.

An unflinchingly intimate chronicle of the filmmaker’s family in Morocco, made from footage collected over more than a decade, In Pieces captures the passage of time across generations. It is a poetic account of a country, as Belabbes, an eccentric figure in Moroccan cinema, records the extent to which larger social and political change has—or has not—affected his modest family. Narrated in a hybrid of first-person plural and singular, the film gracefully shifts between fiction and nonfiction.

Hamza and Zineb travel to a remote area in the Atlas mountains in Morocco to research for parts they’re supposed to play in an upcoming rendition of the legend of Isli and Tisselt – a tale of two lovers whose tears are believed to have created the two lakes that bear their name.

A nonagenarian couple seeks to know the fate of their eldest son kidnapped 37 years ago, during the "years of lead" in Morocco ...

A both empathic and poetic drama set in the Moroccan countryside. Family, poverty, work and pride are the most important motivations of M’Barek, a poor farmer who fights to pay off his debts so that he can keep his land.