Fyzal Boulifa Director of "The Curse"

Fyzal Boulifa and Gavin Humphries, you are the director and the producer of the short film “The Curse”. Where does the action in this film take place? We shot the movie in a place outside Marrakesh. It is notoriously horrible. Every time I told people I want to make a film there everyone would just look at me like “Why? That place looks terrible.” But I liked that the earth was so red and the fact that there is nowhere to hide. It also reminded me a lot of the place where my family originally came from. I guess, I wanted to avoid this kind of exoticism or orientalism you have when watching films from Arab countries.

You guys prefer to work with non-professional actors. Why? For me it is about the kind of essence of a person. And I want to see that on their faces. So, working with non-professionals allows me to see that much more than working with real actors that use more acting techniques. And for this movie in particular I didn’t want that as it is about an outsider and I really wanted that to be reflected by an authentic place and a real face.

So please tell me about the subject of the movie. Well, I came across the idea by a personal anecdote that my mum told me. She grew up in Morocco in a bit of a shithole town. In my head and with the necessary distance I always imagined it as a kind of fairytale story and the teenagers just seemed to be such a nice metaphor for wider society. The actual aggressors in the movie reveal themselves sometimes to be very human, very child-like. They don’t know what they’ve done really. There is the real sadness in it.

by Franziska Knupper