Director: Sofia Alaoui

Stars: Oumaïma Barid, Mehdi Dehbi, Fouad Oughaou

French Moroccan writer-director Sofia Alaoui’s singular and bewitching first feature clocks in at a mere 90 mins but it contains multitudes. Itto (Barid) is a beautiful young woman from a humble background who has married into an elite family and lives in their family home with her businessman husband Amine (Dehbi) and in-laws. The rest of Amine’s family, particularly her icy mother-in-law, are distant and cold. At this point, the film feels like an observational drama about class and gender in Moroccan society, but in the background we can hear TV reports of strange phenomenon and lights in the sky. When her husband and family go on a trip, Itto looks forward to a relaxing time away from judgemental eyes. Then a huge storm arrives causing a national crisis and widespread panic. Cut off, Itta begins a fraught journey to be reunited with her husband where she encounters lower class people who are suspicious of her, while phone lines go down and animals begin behaving very strangely. A cynical and committed atheist, Fouad (Oughaou), reluctantly agrees to help the heavily pregnant woman to reach her family. As well as observations on class, money and gender, Alaoui delivers indelible moments of beauty and ecstatic wonder, augmented by Amine Bouhafa’s haunting and unsettling score and Noé Bach’s luminous cinematography. The meaning remains oblique, but during Itto’s odyssey, the picture captures something of the strangeness and unknowability of existence.

David Willoughby

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