Miloud Habachi

In Moroccan Chronicles, set in the ancient city of Fez, a working class mother, abandoned by her husband who has emigrated to Europe, tells three tales to her just-circumcised ten-year-old son. In the first, Smihi re-stages the Marrakech market scene from Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which a monkey trainer makes children dance for tourists. In the second, two lovers meet on the ramparts of Orson Welles’s Essaouira locations for Othello and speak of their own forbidden love. And in the third, set in Smihi’s home town of Tangier, an old sailor dreams of vanquishing a sea monster: the Gibraltar ferry that connects Europe to Africa.

Zeft is the story of a village, of a changing society torn between the background of traditional beliefs and diffuse aspirations for modernity.

L'Gharbi works in a newspaper's telex booth to classify dispatches. One day while reading a dispatch relating to an island whose governor had disappeared, Al Gharbi identified with the character of the governor of the island of “Chakerbakerben”