Interviews

In Conversation With Award-Winning Moroccan Filmmaker Meryem Benm’Barek

BYMeriem Belhiba

August 6, 2026

Meryem Benm’Barek has built a cinema around the idea that private choices are never entirely private. The Moroccan filmmaker, whose debut Sofia won Best Screenplay in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2018, returns with Behind the Palm Trees, a film she frames explicitly through neo-colonialism and its afterlives in contemporary Morocco.

Set in Tangier, the film follows Mehdi, a young Moroccan architect caught between Selma and Marie, a wealthy French woman who draws him towards another social world. What interests Benm’Barek is how inherited hierarchies surface in the most intimate places: desire, class aspiration, the gaze, and the idea of what a “better” life looks like.

Speaking to MILLE at the Amman International Film Festival (AIFF), she discusses neo-colonialism inside romantic relationships, why she chose a morally uncomfortable male antihero, the politics of intimacy, and the need for greater independence in Moroccan and North African cinema.

MILLE: You describe Behind the Palm Trees very clearly as a film about neo-colonialism. Where do you see that neo-colonialism operating today in Morocco, especially within intimate relationships?

Meryem Benm’Barek: For me, the film really talks about neo-colonialism and about the place French people still occupy in Morocco today. There is still this idea that Morocco was a protectorate, almost as if that somehow means it was a softer form of colonization. Of course, nothing can be compared directly to what happened in Algeria, but I still consider what happened in Morocco to have been colonization. The remains of that history are still present today. You can see them in education, in language, in the way institutions function, but also in something much more intimate.

That is what interests me in the film: how does this larger colonial history enter a romantic relationship? How does it appear in intimacy, in desire, in the way two people look at each other? I am convinced that the devil is in the smallest details of our intimacy. It is through the most ordinary, everyday and intimate scenes that you can reveal the biggest political ideas. For me, politics is not separate from intimacy. It is already there.

Marie does not only desire Mehdi; she also reshapes him socially, professionally, and aesthetically. How were you thinking about class, aspiration, and power in that relationship?

MB: Mehdi comes from the middle class. He is not someone who begins the film desperately wanting more, and he does not really need much more in his life. But Marie starts creating needs for him. For him to become an Arab man who can be socially acceptable within her family, he has to respond to certain criteria. She changes his environment, the way he lives, tries to find him another job, and changes how he dresses.

There is a shopping scene, for example, that is not simply about shopping. It reveals the way she looks at him. She sees him almost like a sculpture that has to be shaped. He is not yet somebody who has the right codes or fits naturally into her social environment, so she begins making him into someone who can. There is also a critique there of a certain capitalist dream, this idea that happiness is somewhere else, that you always have to do better, have more and move higher. The question becomes whether we are actually able to see happiness where it already exists, and what we risk losing if we keep believing it is somewhere else.

Why did you choose to tell the story through Mehdi, an antihero, rather than through Selma, whose point of view might have been more immediately sympathetic?

MB: Because Selma’s point of view would have been much more comfortable. We have already seen many films told through the perspective of an Arab woman who has been mistreated or abused by a man. It would have been much easier morally. I was more interested in ambivalence.

I wanted an antihero. I wanted to be with someone I would not completely love, someone whose choices would make me uncomfortable and force me to question myself. With Selma, we would understand very quickly where we stand. With Mehdi, it is more complicated. And I think, honestly, I probably would have financed the film much more easily if I had told it from Selma’s point of view. But it would have been too easy.

How did you approach the intimate moments between Mehdi and Marie versus Mehdi and Selma, and what do those differences reveal politically?

MB: The intimate scenes are absolutely necessary to the story. What initially pushes Mehdi away from Selma and towards Marie is not simply the fantasy of a better life. It is also sexual frustration. He cannot have the physical relationship he wants with Selma, and then Marie arrives with something that feels much freer and much more accessible. You have to experience that with him for his choices to make sense.

But our relationship with physical intimacy is also cultural. It is shaped by history, education, and the society we come from. Marie, as a French woman, carries a particular history of liberation. That is why the scenes with Marie had to be filmed very differently from the scenes with Selma. With Marie, there is something open, free, almost effortless. Everything seems possible. With Selma, the scenes are much tighter. They are filmed in close-up and with much more modesty because Selma does not give access to her body in the same way. Because the film is told from Mehdi’s point of view, we also have to experience that frustration through him.

There is also the question of the gaze. What does Marie project onto the body of an Arab man? Does she expect him to be dominant? Does she carry certain fantasies about Arab masculinity? That also comes from colonial history. And the same thing happens in the opposite direction. What does he project onto her? When Mehdi enters the villa for the first time, he is fascinated, but he is also troubled by what he sees. He can sense that there is something wrong, but he is still attracted to it. So there is always this question of who looks at whom, what we project onto the other person, and what we bring from our larger political and colonial history into our most intimate relationships.

The film took seven years to finance. What did that process teach you about artistic freedom, European funding, and the need for greater independence in Moroccan and North African cinema?

MB: I think there were real blockages, particularly on the European funding side, and the subject made the film difficult to finance. But what mattered to me was that I did not make artistic concessions. I eventually found a producer who completely let me write and make the film I wanted to make. He never asked me to change what the film was saying. The consequence was that we made the film with less money because it was difficult to finance, but he never asked me to compromise the story. If he had, I would have left.

More broadly, I think there is something very strong happening in Moroccan and North African cinema right now. There are so many different proposals, different genres, and filmmakers with completely different universes. There are thrillers, fantasy films, and romantic films. Everyone has their own voice. For Morocco, which is what I know best, I think there is something very solid already there.

But if we want to become stronger, we need to reach a point where we can be completely independent of European funds, and particularly French funds, so we can tell our stories freely, without judgement and without blockage. Things are changing. We have more regional and national support now, and that is important. But many international funds still have criteria that not every film can respond to. Some films have their own identity, and sometimes filmmakers are asked to make artistic concessions that simply are not possible. That is why I also think directors need to be involved in financing. You cannot leave all that power to the producer. As directors, we are already fighting for our films, so we need to understand that part of the process too, be inventive and find different ways to produce.

At Amman, what do you hope an Arab audience brings to the film, and what kinds of questions do you hope it leaves open rather than answering?

MB: I am really happy to be here because I feel that I am sharing the film in a place where people can understand its complexity. I do not like films that become moralizing or give answers, and I do not think anybody has to leave asking themselves a specific question. You ask questions if you want to ask questions. My ending is quite open, just as the ending of Sofia was open, because for me a film should interrogate rather than answer.

But perhaps the film can make us question our relationship to other people, our relationship to money, privilege, and capitalism. Can we really recognize happiness where it is? Or do we constantly imagine that happiness must exist somewhere else? And what can we lose when we make the wrong choice? Those are the kinds of questions that interest me.

In Conversation With Award-Winning Moroccan Filmmaker Meryem Benm’Barek

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In Conversation With Award-Winning Moroccan Filmmaker Meryem Benm’Barek

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