With “Everybody Loves Touda” released on December 25, filmmaker Nabil Ayouch pays homage to the figure of the sheikha, a traditional Moroccan artist who sings without shame or censorship texts of resistance, love and emancipation, transmitted for centuries. generations.
Touda (Nisrin Erradi) dreams of becoming a sheikha, a traditional Moroccan artist, who sings texts of resistance, love and emancipation, passed down for generations. Performing every evening in the bars of her small provincial town under the gaze and wandering hands of men, Touda nourishes the hope of a better future for herself and her deaf and mute son, whom she raises alone. Abused and humiliated, she decides to leave everything for the lights of Casablanca.
In “Everybody Loves Touda” presented at the last Cannes Film Festival, Franco-Moroccan filmmaker Nabil Ayouch therefore pays homage to this traditional artistic figure by filming his desire for emancipation. After “Haut et fort” (2021) or “Leshorses de Dieu” (2012), he also continues his work of painting contemporary Moroccan society still marked by patriarchy, this time focusing on showing a powerful woman who resists violence that seems banal on a daily basis and refuses to become prey.
“It’s a kind of ordinary banality that really struck me when I heard the life stories of the sheikhas before writing the script for the film. (…) What probably touched me the most, it’s the way in which the next day, they were forced to ignore this violence and return to this whirlwind to keep their heads above water”, explains Nabil Ayouch in the Vertigo show on December 26.
External content
This external content cannot be displayed because it may collect personal data. To view this content you must authorize the category Social networks.
Accept More info
“Strong women, warriors”
Touda, the incandescent heroine of “Everybody Loves Touda”, is a sensual and free woman, who pays dearly for her independence in a society that has difficulty accepting a woman living alone. Actress Nisrin Erradi embodies it as sublimely as subtly. “These are women that I have observed from a distance for a very long time, that I admire and that I look at as strong women, warriors, women who have played an important role in the history of Morocco, who have been all the fights through their songs and who unfortunately had an unenviable destiny”, explains Nisrin Erradi.
Nabil Ayouch films Touda as close as possible to her body, her sufferings and her exultations, but also her thirst for freedom and punctuates the story of her heroine with songs whose lyrics are an integral part of the narrative.
Comments collected by Pierre Philippe Cadert
Adaptation web: Olivier Horner
“Everybody Loves Touda” by Nabil Ayouch, with Nisrin Erradi, Joud Chamihy, Jalila Tlemsi. To be seen in French-speaking cinemas since December 25, 2024.
