Nabil Ayouch, author of the excellent Much Loved which was selected at the Directors' Fortnight in 2015, returns to the Cannes 2024 Festival, this time in the Cannes Première section, with Everybody loves Touda.
Everybody Loves Touda will be released in cinemas from December 18, 2024.
Synopsis: Touda dreams of becoming a Cheikha, a traditional Moroccan artist who sings without modesty or censorship, texts of resistance, love and emancipation that have been handed down for generations. Performing every evening in the bars of her small provincial town under the gaze of men, Touda nurtures the hope of a better future for herself and her son. Mistreated and humiliated, she decides to leave everything behind for the bright lights of Casablanca...
Touda dreams of becoming a sheikha, a traditional Moroccan artist who sings without modesty or censorship, texts of resistance, love and emancipation that have been handed down for generations. The art of the cheikhates is to sing the Aïta, a popular oral poetry invented in the 19th century, which was later banned because of the women's excessive freedom of morals and tone.
Until she does, Touda is content to sing a variety of songs at weddings and bars in her small provincial town. Night after night, she has to fight the stares and wandering hands of drunken men who make everything dirty, relentlessly crossing the boundaries the singer tries to impose on her audience.
Tired of having to sell her soul for a few dirhams thrown at her feet, and shortly after a gang rape suffered during a performance in the wilderness (the film's harrowing first scene), the young woman dreams of seeing her name at the top of the bill and decides to leave for the big city, Casablanca.
Nabil Ayouch chose Moroccan actress Nisrin Erradi to play the role of this strong woman, who mesmerizes the screen. By turns femme fatale, humiliated woman and courageous mother (she looks after her little deaf-mute boy on her own), Touda is above all a free woman in a contemporary Moroccan society still governed by patriarchy.
A true aesthete in the art of filming bodies, Nabil Ayouch offers us many feverish dance scenes, with Moroccan music as the film's second main character, filling the space and comforting the soul. Out of the depths of her entrails, Touda's voice invokes, in the midst of pain, the freedom she dreams of. A marvelous portrait of a woman who freezes us in place, like a cry in the night.
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