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“Aisha Can’t Fly Away,” “Chronicles From the Siege” and “It’s a Sad and Beautiful World” claimed a trio of post-production prizes at this year’s Atlas Workshops, which ran from Dec. 1 – 5 as part of the Marrakech Film Festival.
Winner of the top award, “Aisha Can’t Fly Away” walked away with a €25,000 ($26,409) post-production grant. Directed by Morad Mostafa, the film follows a 26-year-old Sudanese woman working as a caregiver in Ain Shams, a Cairo neighborhood known for its sizable African migrant community. Governmental indifference mixes with racial tensions and gang violence, setting the stage for a dark turn when one gang offers Aisha protection – if she’ll offer a favor in return.
Set for delivery next year, the film already had festival scouts buzzing well before the prizes.
Popular on Variety Speaking with Variety from Marrakech, one prominent festival director praised the film for its “hyper-strong female characters,” and was surprised how nimbly the film segued from social realism to something closer to horror.
“It veers towards genre with an amazing sense of framing and direction,” they said, noting that the project shared a DP Mostafa El Kashef with one of last year’s Atlas winners, “The Village Next to Paradise,” praising the cinematographer’s work in both.
“There’s a real connection there,” the festival director added. “For me, this signals a real revival of Egyptian cinema – and [director] Morad Mostafa is behind it.”
Post-productions jurors Grégoire Melin (Kinology), Giona Nazzaro (Locarno Film Festival) and Malika Rabahallah (Filmfest Hamburg) awarded €20,000 ($21,159) to director Abdallah Al Khatib’s “Chronicles From the Siege.”
The film — from a Palestinian-Syrian director named Peacemaker of the Year by German Greenpeace – follows residents of a war zone as they just try to survive. Told through five stories, the project traces humanity and dark humor throughout.
Rounding out the post-production winners, director Cyril Aris’ “It’s a Sad and Beautiful World” and Bardi, from filmmaker Tala Hadid, claimed respective grants for $10,579 and $5279 in post-production grants. Aris’ supernatural romance follows a Beirut couple brought together and torn apart by cosmic forces, while Hadid’s doc is the middle part of a triptych that follows a traveling brotherhood of horsemen across Morocco.
On the development side, top honors went to Fabien Dao’s “Princesse Téné,” an Ouagadougou-set western of sorts about a horse-trainer turned underworld queenpin.
A graduate of prestigious French film school La Fémis, Dao has previously directed a trilogy of short films about his father, a Burkinabe film director. Produced by Moustapha Sawadogo of Future Films, Dao’s feature debut has already won support at Montreal’s Nouveau Marché. The project received $31,739 in development support.
Another $31,739 was split between additional development prize winners “Ici Repose” from director Moly Kane and producers Lionel Massol, Pauline Seigland and Ngagne Sankhe; “Samir, the Accidental Spy” from director Charlotte Rabate and producer Coralie Dias; and “Lucky Girl,” from director Linda Lô and producer Didar Domehri.
Rounding out the prizes, filmmaker Lina Soualem’s fiction debut “Alicante” snagged the Artekino International prize to the tune of $6,500.
The awards capped a growth year for the workshops, which more doubled in length, introducing a four-day online component held in November and an extra day devoted to small-group creative labs on the ground in Marrakech. This seventh edition also welcomed prestigious visitors like Alfonso Cuarón and mentors like Jeff Nichols.
“Our lives are very busy,” Nichols said at the closing ceremony. “It’s very easy to keep our eyes down, to keep our eyes on our projects, on the corner of the world that we’re in. I can honestly tell you this week, my eyes have been opened and my heart has been open to a much broader part of the world.”
“We’re very privileged to make movies,” he continued. “It’s not something everyone gets to do. I couldn’t be more proud of the projects that I encountered here and to know that they are going to look at their lives, they’re going to look at the experiences… [And] it’s going to change the world. It’s possible, and you all are making that possible. So thank you for letting me be a small part of it.”
Since 2018, the workshops have supported 152 projects, among them 60 Moroccan films. Last year, two of those projects took top honors at the wider Marrakech Film Festival – with Asmae el Medour’s “The Mother of All Lies” making history as the first local film to win the top prize. In light of such success, the festival team recently introduced the Atlas Station program to help support 10 emerging Moroccan filmmakers.
