Projects in development
Akal
Synopsis
“I am a former alpine skiing champion from Morocco. In my father's library, I came upon some old VHS tapes in which I see myself as a child, putting on my first pair of skis in the snow-covered mountains of the High Atlas, a few kilometers from my hometown of Marrakech. Driven by these memories, I return to the mountains, where there is no snow on the peaks and the abandoned ski lifts creak in the wind against the backdrop of a vast landscape.
I then discovered that the resort where I learned to ski was a pasture where shepherds from neighboring villages brought their flocks in summer. And I wondered: how could a ski resort have been built in a place where skiing once seemed unthinkable?”
Kasbah Films (Morocco)
Karim Debbagh & Basma Rkioui
Massala Production (France)
Charlotte Guénin
Director’s statement
When we were children, every weekend, my father took my brothers and me to Oukaïmeden, 70 kilometers from our city of Marrakech. He taught us to ski. At school, we were nicknamed “the skiing siblings,” in a country where this sport is not very popular. At 17, a fall put an end to my dreams of becoming a champion. I stopped competing, but I continued to return to the mountains, rediscovering people, figures from my childhood, and symbols of those peaks. Years later, when I found and digitized my father's old VHS tapes, I saw a snow-covered and lively Oukaïmeden—a place that is now almost deserted. The snow is gone, the ski lifts are motionless, the cafés are empty. The landscape of my childhood, filled with skis and memories, has become a capsule of the past. With my camera, I film what remains—and what is fading away.
Biographies
Basma Rkioui is a documentary filmmaker. After graduating from studies in film at ESAV Marrakech and completing a university exchange program in documentary filmmaking at the Filmakademie in Germany, she attended La Fémis Summer University. Rkioui is particularly interested in archives and explores their integration into creative documentary cinema. Her short documentary Louka (2023) was selected for the Carthage Film Festival, the Trento Film Festival, and the Poitiers Film Festival, and was named Best Short Film at the Rabat International Film Festival.
Karim Debbagh was born in Tangier in 1972 and discovered cinema alongside his friend and mentor, the American writer Paul Bowles. After studying English literature in Tetouan, Debbagh trained at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. In 2005, he founded Kasbah Films, now one of Morocco's most renowned production companies. A committed producer, he has been involved in some of the most notable works in Moroccan cinema, such as Fyzal Boulifa’s The Damned Don’t Cry and Al Hadi Ulad Mohand’s Life Suits Me Well.
Institut français au Maroc, Hot Docs Blue Ice Fund, Doha Film Institute
March 2027
