"Les Chevaux de Dieu" / God's Horses

Nabil Ayouch's film is an intimate portrait of boys growing up in a toxic environment.

Powerfully narrated and convincingly acted without talking down to any of its characters, God’s Horses takes the viewer inside an immense Moroccan slum and describes the no-future lives of its inhabitants; very gradually it gets around to showing how fundamentalist recruiters entrenched themselves there after 9/11 and used it as a hunting ground for terrorists and suicide bombers. It ranks alongside Tunisian director Nouri Bouzid’s Making Of for its insights on the subject. Though ultimately based on real events, the film avoids a documentary feeling with director Nabil Ayouch(Whatever Lola Wants) turning in an even-handed but heartfelt work that should earn festival kudos and make inroads in art house markets abroad.

There is a kind of brutal poetry in Ayouch’s depiction of the harsh childhood of Yachine (Abdelhakim Rachid) and his inseparable pal Nabil (Hamza Souidek), under the protective fists of Yachine’s older 13-year-old brother Hamid. Soccer games turn into life-threatening fights, weddings into drunken revels, and the string of insults and obscenities hurled at them by parents and grown-ups serves to toughen them up for the hopeless disenfranchisement of adulthood. Growing up, the violent Hamid (Abdelilah Rachid) is thrown into prison for two years; when he gets out, he’s changed into a glassy-eyed fundamentalist, whose mild manners are more preoccupying than his previous violence.

 

Jamal Belmahi’s screenplay, based on Mahi Binebine’s novelization of five simultaneous terrorist explosions in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, uses current events – the death of King Hassan II, the attack on the World Trade Center – to explain how dwellers in the Sidi Moumen slum slowly turned towards keeping women at home and tolerating, when not embracing, the rise of fundamentalism. Not everyone buys into the bearded folks’ preaching that “supporting Al Qaeda is a religious duty,” but the film shows how insidiously the fundamentalist cell takes over the role of the police in protecting people, aiding the poor and even absolving murder, when one of their own is involved.  

   

And yet, this is less a film about terrorists than an intimate portrait of boys growing up in a toxic environment. All the non-pro actors turn in natural performances, but the dark, brooding Rachid gets under the skin in the main role. Tech work is high quality throughout, with Hichame Alaouie’s cinematography adding lyric notes to the squalor and Malvina Meinier’s score building towards the inevitable, heart-wrenching climax in Casablanca.  

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard), May 19, 2012


Production companies: Les Films du nouveau monde, Ali N’ Productions, Stone Angels, YC Aligator Film, Artemis Productions
Cast: Abdelhakim Rachid, Abdelilah Rachid, Hamza Souidek, Ahmed El Idrissi El Amrani
Director: Nabil Ayouch
Screenwriter: Jamal Belmahi, based on a novel by Mahi Binebine
Producers: Nabil Ayouch, Pierre-Ange Le Pogam, Eric Van Beuren, Patrick Quinet, Saïd Hamich

...

If you've been to Casablanca, the chances are you've walked, or driven, past one of the many shanty towns which make Morocco's biggest city a chequerboard of wealth and poverty. My last stroll, to a restaurant overlooking the Atlantic shore, involved making our way through a scrappy football match on rough ground where nine year olds fought like little tigers over the ball. Through holes in the surrounding white walls, you could glimpse the small shacks where they lived, dust covered and parched under the blazing sun.
Nabil Ayouch's film Horses of God begins with such a match, so identical to what I walked through it could have been the same place and time. 
After the tackles spill over into violence the camera races after the boys as they are chased for their lives over a motorway to their hole in the wall, Narnia in reverse if you like, and we are introduced to Sidi Moumen, the boys permanent home, and ours for the next two hours, in all its impoverished decrepitude.

In 2003, 45 people were killed in downtown Casablanca when 12 suicide bombers detonated their murderous luggage in a series of coordinated explosions at mostly Jewish businesses - bars, restaurants, a luxury hotel. The 12 bombers all came from the shanty towns of Sidi Moumen, in the north east of the City.

Morocco is a liberal country, with peaceful coexistence between Islam and Christianity. Director Nabil Ayouch was as shocked as everyone else, and determined to find out what allowed this outrage to stab directly at the heart of his own culture.

His fictionalised account of the boys growing up from knockabout football to gory self destruction and murder, is a detailed account of unemployment and despondency afflicting young men everywhere, but empowered by the authentic shanty town location in which virtually the entire film is set. The performances and camerawork combine for a tightly paced, emotional storyline in close up: there may be domestic happiness as evident here as anywhere else, but there's also brutality and ugliness. Few of the actors are professional, and the two central characters are brothers on screen and in real life.

Not every pointless adolescence leads to such bloody tragedy but when you have jihadists waiting in the wings, offering rewards of eternal happiness and heavenly virgins in exchange for companionship and camaraderie, the mix can be, literally, explosive.