A few days before the French release of his first feature film, Animalia, Sofia Alaoui, Franco-Moroccan director, tells us about her project to film her changing country of birth, through fictions that borrow as much from documentaries as from genre films. The video interview took place from Casablanca, where she settled eight years ago.
Awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival (Utah) in January, Animalia follows the contours of an apocalyptic road trip, to prosper from surprise to surprise, between the Morocco of the new rich and the mountains of the Atlas of the Imazighen (from which the filmmaker draws her origins). The opportunity for this 33-year-old young woman to question the weight of religion and money.
Your film questions religion. Have you been pressured?
Animalia will be released throughout the Arab world, from Qatar to Morocco. However, it was important for me not to be provocative, in order to be able to reach people who have a very dogmatic relationship to religion. Moreover, the character of Fouad, who does not believe in God, was inspired by meetings I had after the broadcast of my first short film. [Qu’importe si les bêtes meurent, Grand Prix du jury au Festival de Sundance en 2020 et César en 2021] in the Atlas Mountains… In Morocco, there are plenty of people who don’t believe in God.
Your heroine evolves in a bourgeois environment that we don’t often see in Moroccan cinema…
It is a fact. Several decision-makers in the life of the film shared this reflection with me: “The bourgeoisie interests us less than the shepherds. I find that very serious because it reflects a form of Orientalism. What does that mean ? We, the Arabs, wouldn’t have the right to film our bourgeois? Our films should only talk about the countryside? I went to the French high school in Casablanca, I live in this big city and, in my daily life, I rub shoulders more easily with this bourgeois class. I want to question it and show it. The new rich, whose money arrived very quickly in the families, are attracted by all that glitters and consume a lot. They are also very pious and traditionalists. We are far from the Iranian or Egyptian bourgeois imagination of fifty years ago, with men who smoked cigarettes while speaking English.
We enter the film through a vast residence whose tinsel you enjoy filming…
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