Sofia Alaoui’s Moroccan short film So What If The Goats Die, a mystery adventure following a shepherd in the Atlas mountains, won the grand jury prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2020 and the César award for best short fiction film in 2021.
Born in Casablanca to a Moroccan Muslim father and a French Christian mother, Alaoui grew up largely in China because her father was a diplomat. While in the far east, Alaoui recalls musing on how different her life would have been had she been brought up in a Chinese family, rather than a traditional Muslim household.
That exploration of life’s curveballs is central to So What If The Goats Die, which follows a shepherd encountering strange phenomena when scavenging for food to save his dying livestock. As with much of Alaoui’s work, it’s a genre hybrid – as she describes it, “a sci-fi movie with a naturalistic approach”.
Alaoui pursued her dream to be a director by studying at the Ecole Internationale de Création Audiovisuelle et de Réalisation (Eicar) in Paris. She began making short films in 2013, mainly documentaries including Le Rēve De Cendrillon and Les Enfants De Naplouse, which were broadcast on French television.
In 2016, the filmmaker decided to move back to Morocco, initially to Casablanca and, this year, to the capital Rabat, where she runs her production company Jiango Films. “In France, it’s hard to get free from the box industry professionals want to put Arabs inside,” she says. “So I decided to move to Rabat, where I could make films that challenge the white male gaze.”
Alaoui has recently wrapped on her debut feature Parmi Nous (whose English title is currently Oum), a €3m ($3.1m) feature which sees the Atlas Mountains lakeside home of a pregnant woman and her wealthy in-laws invaded by aliens. Starring Mehdi Dehbi, Fouad Oughaou, Souad Khouyi and newcomer Oumaïma Barid, it is produced by France’s Wrong Films with Moroccan production outfits SRAB Films, Jianga Films and Dounia productions.
The film, whose backers include CNC, Moroccan Cinema Centre and the Doha Film Institute, is expected early next year. Enthuses Alaoui: “It’s a good time to be an Arab filmmaker telling stories that are different.”
Contact: Sofiajalaoui@icloud.com
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