Dounia is a liberal-minded Moroccan Muslim who has been dishonoured in the eyes of her family because she has divorced her husband, and is living in sin with a Christian guy. Her 8-year-old son has been taken from her, although she has visiting privileges. Her dream is to get the hell out of Morocco and take her son with her.
She and her boyfriend are entrepreneurs, leading a team of illegal immigrant workers at a private construction site. When they unearth a valuable 4th century Christian vault at the site, Dounia sees the chance to make the money that will make her dream come true. Although the entire construction site is illegal, this is in corruption-ridden Morocco where this sort of thing is par for the course. Dounia has a number of connections, including to some university archeologists, all of which agree to keep the whole thing very hush-hush. The university buys the main artifact for a nice sum of money – but the logistics of the whole operation is thrown into chaos by one of the workers, Gabriel, who steals a human skull from the vault. Unable to fence it, he arrives at the construction site one night to try and return it, superstitiously thinking it will bring him bad luck if he doesn’t. He really shouldn’t have returned it, for this brings him very bad luck indeed.
Dounia is a no-nonsense type of woman who likes to control everything around her. But as people are not easily controlled, and emotions run high when her driver and childhood friend, Ali, falls in love with her, things spiral out of control.
Whether the director feels that Dounia is justified in what she does – the many lines she crosses – is not quite clear to me, but based on how chaotically things develop, I had expected a rather different ending.
The narrative style of the movie is somewhat indebted to Pulp Fiction; events are not depicted in the right order, and it takes a while for this to dawn on the viewer. It enables the director to tell the story in an unconventional way, however, which works well. The acting is also unimpeachable, and it is generally a tale that holds the attention. As with last year’s CPH PIX Film Festival, a common core theme here is that of illegal African immigrants in the mediterranean area, and how their presence occasionally threatens to unhinge the usual workings of everyday life and the attitudes of people in the wealthier countries. A thoughtful and realistic movie with believable characters, and even some intermittent humour.
Director: Nadir Moknèche
Cast: Lubna Azabal, Rasha Bukvic, Faouzi Bensaïdi, Ralph Amoussou, Grégory Gadebois and others.
Runtime: 105 min.
Country: France / Morocco
Film Rating: 
