Feature Narrative Film
TOTAL BUDGET
US $810,067
CONFIRMED FINANCING
US $10,000
CONTACT
rimnaiir@gmail.com
+212690533003
A teenager flees her broken family home to the mountains, where she gradually undergoes an irreversible transformation.
Sixteen-year-old Nouha lives in a bubble between an unstable relationship with her mother, and her wanderings with Omar, Amine, and other boys in a motorbike gang. Her father unexpectedly reappears after repetitive abandonments, trying to win his family back.
Eventually, Nouha’s parents get back together, but she struggles to accept it. She ends up escaping with her friends, on motorbikes, heading up to the mountains of the Grand Atlas.
The group of teenagers live in a small house that belongs to Omar's uncle. They spend their time wandering between the river and the forest. Nouha encounters the spirits of the river and the woods, Taghzent and Aghzen, who both want to possess her.
As supernatural forces begin to affect reality beyond Nouha’s understanding, she undergoes a process of metamorphosis. To what extent would it affect Nouha’s own flesh? And how would it change her life forever?
For my first feature film, I chose to tackle adolescence because it is a particularly sensitive period of life to which I connect deeply; I still conserve the memory of being scared of growing up and becoming an adult. Nouha, the main character, is an adolescent who bears the weight of a vivid anxiety of time passing by. She tries to deal with it, by constantly escaping the inexorable sands of time. She has no choice but to confront her existential crisis. The film is a modern tale of a teenage girl awakening to supernatural dimensions, which make her cross reality’s borders.
What are the internal challenges adolescents meet as they grow up? What’s the impact of the inevitable process of growing up, on their body and soul? Using those questions, the film opens a window to catch a glimpse into the contemporary Moroccan adolescent world with intimacy and delicacy.
Plum Season is our first feature film, both for Rim as a director and for me as a producer. But this is far from being our first collaboration. We have known each other for years now through ESAV student networks, and since then, we had been actively working on the development and production of our respective projects as a team of producer/director in both capacities, until the creation of Tifaw Films in 2018, the production company that we manage together.
If our journey has been this way, it is also through the common vision that we share on the Moroccan cinematic production, and even the contemporary international one. When I produce Rim’s projects, I see in her—and in the way she defends her artistic choices—a certain radicality with which I strongly identify. The subjectivity of an author, the determination and the talent they have to express it, is what creates their singularity.
And that's what I look for as a young producer in the Arab world—to help singular and important gazes to come out to the world. Rim is a young director who approaches the stories she tells and the mise en scène she elaborates with sensitivity and imagination. I think that Plum Season, with its hybridization of genre, is a great film to present to the Arab public and Arabic cinema lovers as a unique chance to discover other ways to make films in our region.
2018: Jayeen