Ali Zaoua_Morocco

Ali Zaoua

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Directed by	Nabil Ayouch
Produced by	Etienne Comar Jean Cottin Antoine Voituriez
Written by	Nabil Ayouch Nathalie Saugeon
Starring	Maunim Kbab Abdelhak Zhayra Hicham Moussaune Amal Ayouch Mustapha Hansali
Music by	Krishna Levy
Cinematography	Renaat Lambeets Vincent Mathias
Editing by	Jean-Robert Thomann
Distributed by	Arab Film Distribution (USA)
Release date(s)	September 8, 2000 (2000-09-08)
Running time	90 minutes
Country	Morocco
Language	Arabic French

Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets is a 2000 Moroccan crime drama film that tells the story of several homeless boys. It was awarded in the 2000 Stockholm Film Festival and in the 2000 Amiens International Film Festival.

Plot

Kwita (Maunim Kbab), Omar (Mustapha Hansali), Boubker (Hicham Moussaune) and Ali Zaoua (Abdelhak Zhayra) are homeless boys living in Casablanca. The boys were in a gang led by Dib (Said Taghmaoui), but decide to rebel against him under Ali's guidance. However, Ali is killed by members of the gang while he is hired as a cabin boy on a ship, and the other boys decide to give him a proper funeral. Kwita sits a cemetery where his lack of religious training is criticized while Omar briefly returns to Dib's gang. Boubker, the smallest and most vulnerable of the boys, threatens to kill himself but recovers his sense of self and helps the old fisherman on his boat.

Awards

• Bronze Horse, 2000 Stockholm Film Festival
• Audience Award, 2000 Amiens International Film Festival

Ali Zaoua (2002)
 

Reviewed by Jamie Russell

Ali Zaoua may have been left to wander the streets of Casablanca with the rest of the city's glue-sniffing street urchins, but when he's killed in a stone fight with a gang of boys, his three friends decide to bury him "like a prince".
Eking out a life amid the squalor of Morocco's port and taking refuge in the city's abandoned construction sites, Kwita, Omar, and Boubker don't have much chance of giving him the funeral he deserves. They can barely find enough food to eat, whatever money they steal gets spent on glue, and deaf-and-dumb gang leader Dib (Saïd Taghmaoui, from "Three Kings") is after them.
Nabil Ayouch's film immerses us in the lives of these grubby street kids, limiting the adult roles to just three characters. It's at its best when showing us the fractured innocence that these children share - they may only be eight, but they've already developed an understanding of the harsh realities of the world that's far beyond their years. At the same time, Ayouch captures their childish dreams in a series of (glue-induced) hallucinations where a series of chalk drawings come to life.
The script puts this clash between innocence and experience to good effect in the marvellous dialogue that constantly switches from naiveté to profanity and back again. But it's the beguiling performances from the three young children that are really captivating, and it's their sense of the comic and the tragic elements of their predicament that gives the film its enjoyable energy. A real treat.