Discovered in the prestigious competition at the Krakow International Short Film Festival, Aicha is a singular find from Morocco. Traumatized by an assault, a young girl retreats into silence in the face of a distant mother. At the crossroads of fantasy cinema, animation, and musical theater, this unpredictable and intense story displays a strong personality in its original approach to still-taboo subjects. Director Sanaa El Alaoui is our guest.
One of Aicha's starting points is based on real events. Can you tell me more about what inspired you to tell this particular story?
Aicha's origins do indeed stem from real events that deeply affected me. In 2012, the story of Amina El Filali, a 16-year-old girl from Laarache who took her own life after being forced to marry the man who raped her, shocked Morocco and the world, and it remains etched in my memory. Years later, I realized that despite legislative changes, the real prison remains in people's minds, in families, in the silence. Young girls are still pressured to marry their abusers, still urged to suppress their pain or hide their shame. Another turning point came much closer to home. With her permission, I'm sharing that my teenage sister struggled with self-harm. We found her arms and legs covered in razor cuts, and blades hidden in her small bookcase. When my mother finally broke the silence and spoke openly to other women in our community, something shocking happened: almost every mother whispered back, “I thought I was the only one whose child was going through this.” This collective confession revealed how deeply mental health is stifled by shame, secrecy, and loneliness. That moment made me realize: the time had come to create Aicha.
Finally, there is Aicha Kandicha, the mythical figure I feared as a child. We grew up hearing about her as a demon haunting forests and springs, a beautiful woman with long black hair and goat feet. But as I delved deeper, I discovered another version of her story: not a monster, but a woman who resisted colonial forces, who used myth to protect the vulnerable. Her duality—feared and powerful, demonized and heroic—became the spiritual backbone of the film. I wasn't compelled to tell this story by a single event, but rather by the accumulation of silences. Silences surrounding assault, forced marriage, mental health, and the stories of women whose narratives are distorted or erased. Aicha is my attempt to break these silences, to give form, voice, and myth to what too often remains hidden. Aicha is here to cry out for the victims of sexual abuse.
What prompted you to use a cinematic language sometimes reminiscent of fantasy and genre films?
One of the first notes I pinned to my whiteboard when I started writing Aicha was: how can I bring the audience closer to the trauma of rape while remaining responsible and cautious When someone is a victim of sexual abuse, time and space no longer function normally; they fragment. Reality becomes disjointed, sounds resonate strangely, memories surface in flashes, and the body feels simultaneously hyper-present and absent. I tried to express this fragmentation through the film's sound design, its visual texture, and its use of fantasy and genre conventions. These forms became my muses because they allowed me to represent the trauma without exploiting it. I have a strong background in film theory, with a BA in Film & Culture from ELTE University and an MSc in Film Aesthetics from Oxford. Some people say that theory can't train filmmakers, but I disagree. Theory made me a meta-thinker: it gave me the tools to reflect on images before creating them. If I had to do it all over again, I would choose the same path.
Genre cinema, especially horror and fantasy, has always been close to my heart. Growing up in a society where so much can't be said aloud, fantasy became a safe language for expressing what is left unsaid. Personally, my own childhood is hazy: I don't have many memories of it. I believe that trauma shapes a filmmaker's originality. It's often what gives a film its signature. For me, horror became an environment in which I could confront once-overwhelming traumas, under the control of the lens. I joined forces with producer Piotr Kaczorowski to found the first production company dedicated to genre cinema in Morocco. We see genre as a frontier for local filmmakers, a space where imagination, myth, and reality can finally meet on equal footing.
I read that, while writing Aicha, you wanted to explore “time and space from an indigenous perspective.” Could you elaborate on what you mean by that?
My academic background, particularly my MSc in Film Aesthetics at Oxford, focused on Moroccan cinema and the tension between self and other. Through my research into Afrofuturism, Islamofuturism, Amazighfuturism, and postcolonial film theory, I arrived at an idea that profoundly influenced Aicha: the greatest danger to indigenous cinema is not Orientalism from the outside, but self-Orientalism. This occurs when Moroccan filmmakers end up exoticizing their own people, repeating the same visual clichés that were imposed on us in the past. Every time we do this, we widen the gap between the screen and the indigenous viewer. The challenge is significant because the cinematic apparatus itself—the camera, the editing, the iconography upon which it is built—is rooted in Western artistic traditions.
Meanwhile, in Moroccan and, more broadly, indigenous North African art, our relationship to nature and the divine is expressed through geometry: mosaics, zellige tiles, repetitive patterns. These are not decorative elements; they encode a cosmology. They express infinity, rhythm, repetition, cycles. So I asked myself: how can we adapt a machine built on linear perspective and chronological time to a worldview based on cycles, spirals, and eternal return? This is where the idea of exploring time and space from an indigenous perspective entered Aicha's writing. In many indigenous cultures, including Amazigh and nomadic traditions, time is not linear. It is cyclical. Past, present, and future coexist and interact. Even socially, Moroccans often think "around" the clock: we follow the moon for Ramadan, for Eid, for agricultural rhythms. People joke that Moroccans are always late, but that's also because our sense of time is circular rather than linear.
So I asked myself: what happens if I confront the camera with this cyclical understanding of time and let the collision produce something new? Instead of forcing the story into a beginning-middle-end structure, I let events resonate, return, fold back into one another, the traumas of the past spilling into the present, the myths of centuries past shaping the reality of a girl today. Space, too, became part of this experience. For example, the hammam in the film is designed with Moroccan mosaics whose geometric patterns point toward infinity. These spaces are not neutral; they carry a cosmological weight. They remind us that life, death, nature, and the supernatural are not separate; they flow together. The film's themes themselves revolve around Aicha; for every gift, there is a demand. Everything moves in circles. Thus, when I say that I wanted to explore time and space from an indigenous perspective, I mean that I tried to let Moroccan cosmology reshape the cinematic form from within, to bend the camera toward our rhythm, our patterns, our cycles, our way of experiencing the visible and the invisible.
How did you choose your ideal way to represent, or not represent, sexual assault in your film? Did you work with collaborators on the animated sequence? Can you tell us about that process?
I’ve always loved animation. For me, it’s a therapeutic tool, a space where the unknown becomes accessible. Animation draws attention to how an individual subjectively experiences an event; it allows us to see the inner world, not just the outer. I used to absentmindedly doodle strange shapes whenever I was waiting or bored. At the time, I thought it meant nothing, but now I believe those shapes were trying to communicate something. Animation became the place where those shapes, that subconscious language, could finally be expressed. It allowed Aicha to scream louder, but in a way that the audience could receive without looking away.
When I met Tomek and Kasumi (animation artists), I explained the film's world to them—its mythology, its trauma, its inner emotional landscape—and something immediately clicked. They understood it instinctively. They even traveled to Morocco, using their own resources, to attend the entire six-day shoot for what would ultimately become just one minute of animation. This devotion is one of the reasons why the sequence carries so much emotional weight. Some ideas came directly from the set. For example, the hands crawling across the girl's face: this came from Tomek walking alone on the beach during the filming of the scene with the woman in a burka. He saw crabs clinging to the rocks, sketched them, and suddenly imagined them becoming hands gripping her face. During pre-production, I had already asked him to focus intensely on the hands; they are physical, intrusive, uncomfortable. They allow me to place the viewer in two terrifying positions simultaneously: the perspective of the victim, feeling the touch; and the perspective of the aggressor, confronted with the violence of this act. Live-action footage gives us the physical presence of the character, their humanity, their body moving in real space. Animation externalizes what it cannot express.
I interpreted the film’s unexpected stylistic variations as an invitation to question my potentially preconceived views on these specific topics and on a culture to which I don’t belong. How important was it for you to maintain a sense of surprise and unpredictability in Aicha?
The power of cinema lies in its universality. I’ve always been fascinated by Jung’s idea of the “collective unconscious,” its shared symbols, fears, and desires that connect all human beings. When I was writing Aicha, I worried that non-Moroccan viewers wouldn’t understand certain cultural details. But I realized that trying to make everything comprehensible to non-Moroccans only diluted the story and turned it into a metaphor. Instead, I wanted to create a work that invites the audience into our spiritual world and encourages them to discover what is shared across cultures. Trauma, music, rituals—these are universal themes, and cinema itself is a ritual. From the moment you buy a ticket, enter the theater, and sit in the darkness, you become part of a shared, collective experience. In this sense, surprise and unpredictability weren't a conscious stylistic goal initially, but emerged naturally from the way the film interacts with time, space, and myth. By refusing to explain everything, by allowing the images, sounds, and narrative to unfold unexpectedly, the audience is invited to actively engage, to question their own assumptions, and to feel the story rather than simply observe it. Aicha is a welcome invitation: come, explore, and you'll discover that beneath the surface, we're not so different, only filtered through our cultural lenses.
Aicha is your first work of fiction. What did your previous experience as a documentary filmmaker bring to this particular project?
I’ve never believed in a strict separation between fiction and documentary. My short documentary Icarus (2020) was itself an experiment with the documentary form, questioning what is real, what is constructed, and how the audience perceives the truth. I constantly like to question forms because the world is dynamic and we change every day. This approach directly influenced Aicha. Take the Gnawa ceremony in the film: it was real, but we edited and assembled it in such a way that it could be experienced as fiction. Even the mother’s trance was real; at one point we had to wake her with water. Yet in the film, it exists within the fictional narrative. For me, documentary and fiction are not separate; they are connected by a bridge.
Aicha tackles many taboos. Can you tell us about the production and filming process in Morocco?
The main taboo we faced wasn't actually the subject of rape itself, but rather the depiction of teenagers self-harming. In Morocco, this reality is often hidden, but surprisingly, we encountered no obstacles in filming these scenes. The real challenge was the production process. We shot Aicha in just six days. One of the most difficult tasks was finding a bathroom that resembled the one in my grandfather's house from my childhood. Modern Moroccan homes often erase traditional mosaics in favor of contemporary designs, so nothing matched the memory I needed. Finally, we went to my grandfather's house with the director of photography, photographed the tiles, and then, with our production designer Nabill, we printed them out and rebuilt the bathroom from scratch. The entire set measured only 2 square meters, extremely small, but it allowed me to recreate a very personal space for remembrance.
Another sensitive area was the Gnawa ceremony. In Morocco, these rituals are powerful, and not everyone feels comfortable around them. Some crew members even refused to come to the set on the day of filming. But I insisted on including the ceremony because it is part of our spiritual landscape, and it connects the fictional world of the film to real cultural practices. The ceremony we captured was authentic, and for me, that authenticity was essential.
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