At 86, Halima lives by the Moroccan coast, gathering mussels and selling what she can. A phone call disturbs the quiet of her days and draws her back to a life in the Rif mountains. Years earlier, widowed and determined to remain in the house her husband left her, she resisted a project that threatened to drive her from her land. With few ways to support herself, she became involved in the illegal cannabis trade. Yassine El Idrissi moves between these periods, gradually revealing the choices behind a woman’s apparent solitude and the costs of holding on to a home.Khadija Amari gives Halima a presence at once formidable and tender. Her performance, awarded Best Actress at the Shanghai International Film Festival, carries the character through changes of place and time without smoothing away her contradictions. A glance or a stubborn silence can express both the weight of loss and the resolve to survive. Around her, the supporting cast brings an unforced sense of life to the film’s rural world.El Idrissi, who also won Best Director at Shanghai, approaches this story with the patience of an observer. His portrait of one woman opens onto a larger reality: displacement, poverty and the conditions that push people toward a criminalised livelihood. The film’s spare dialogue and occasional ellipses leave some connections to be made through Halima herself. Amari gives those passages an emotional continuity, keeping the person in view as the story shifts. The stark landscape is more than a picturesque backdrop; it is the land she knows, the source of her survival and the place she refuses to surrender. In Halima’s struggle, the political stakes remain inseparable from the stubborn particulars of a life.Teresa Cavina