Projects in development
THE LAST BEAST OF ATLAS
Synopsis
A forest and wildlife enthusiast, Aqqa became the best hunter in his region at an early age. His wide-ranging knowledge of the forest is matched only by his immutable sense of freedom. Attempts to domesticate this wild soul turned him into a bloodthirsty bandit. With his gang, he sowed terror throughout the 1990s. The legend of Boulouhouch spreads throughout the country, presenting him as a mythical being with superhuman powers who had to be taken down in an increasingly modernized and rationalized Morocco. The film explores the fall of a man in search of freedom in a green far-west; the Atlas Mountains.
Director’s statement
Among the tales of Moroccan organized crime, Boulouhouch stands out as a fascinating legend. Stories about him, as unreal as they are sinister, feed a vicarious desire for modern mysticism in the collective imagination. Yet, at the heart of these tales remains an Atlas man, an old model of the Seghrouchen tribe, capable of surviving alone in the forest. He embodies the last Atlas lion threatened with domestication and life in a zoo. With a grounded, authentic approach, I want this film to tell a human story, while also deconstructing myth through cinematic reality. A twilight Western, punctuated by the cries of Ahidous, and the synchronized rifle shots of the Tbourida. A human epic that recounts the Atlas of the 1990s, transposing a neo-Amazigh style onto landscapes à la David Friedrich. To tell this story is to evoke the end of an era while scrutinizing the uncertain—thus inventing the new.
Biographies
Born in Casablanca in 1991, Walid Messnaoui graduated from ESAV Marrakech in 2012 with a degree in directing, followed by a master's degree in editing in 2015. With this dual training, he was keen to bring his vision to the screen through the stories, settings, characters, and lights from his childhood; a vision made real when he made his portrait of Casablanca, Six and Zero (2015). His second short film, No Key (2022), a social drama set in a world of bandits, was selected for the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and Fantastic Fest in Austin, and won the Jury Prize at the National Film Festival in Tangier.
Moroccan producer Taoufik Rais has nurtured his passion for cinema from an early age. In 2019, he co-founded Caestus Films, a production company renowned for the quality of its work, which has won awards at numerous prestigious festivals around the world. Driven by his desire to share the richness and diversity of Moroccan stories and myths with the world, Rais aspires to bring them to screens around the globe.
