ANIMALIA Exclusive Clips: Moroccan Sci-fi Thriller Available Now on Digital And On Demand

Itto, a young woman from a modest rural background, is slowly adapting to the Moroccan privileged codes of her husband’s family. But when supernatural events put the country in a state of emergency, Itto finds herself separated from her husband and new family. Alone, pregnant and looking for her way back, she finds emancipation. 

By turns esoteric, enigmatic, and hermetic, Animalia marks the arrival of a new, freshly original cinematic voice, albeit an atypical, idiosyncratic, unorthodox one.

 

While Alaoui interweaves a not-so-gentle critique of a heavily stratified Moroccan society, she deliberately keeps the nature and extent of the meteorological phenomenon ambiguous and undefined. Instead, she focuses on the reactions to the potential visitation of extraterrestrial beings to our world and how a particular organized religion (Islam) would respond to a world-changing event, offering meaningful comfort to some and empty platitudes to others. 

 

Alaoui also leaves the overriding question open of how much the encounter with an alien intelligence, if any, would lead to significant, real change on a social, cultural, and political level, suggesting, contrary to Itto’s direct experience, that those changes would be felt superficially by some or even many.