Interviews

Moroccan Actress Nadia Kounda on Motherhood, Female Desire, and Behind the Palm Trees

BYMeriem Belhiba

July 31, 2026

By the time Behind the Palm Trees arrives at the Amman International Film Festival (AIFF), the film’s protagonist, Selma, has already traveled far beyond Morocco. That’s because director Meryem Benm’Barek’s second feature had premiered in Competition at the Marrakech International Film Festival before continuing its journey across Europe. Its recent screening in Amman, however, brings the film closer to audiences living within some of the same legal and social realities that shape its story.

MILLE sat down with Moroccan actress Nadia Kounda, who takes on the role of Selma, a young woman whose pregnancy out of wedlock leaves her navigating abandonment, faith, desire, and a devastating absence of protection.

But for Kounda, understanding Selma meant looking beyond the screenplay. “I felt I needed to look beyond the script and understand the broader reality surrounding unmarried pregnancy,” she says.

That search led her to 100% Mamans, a Moroccan association supporting unmarried mothers. There, she met women whose stories often began with love before becoming stories of abandonment, fear and survival.

Some had wanted abortions but were unable to access them. Others had attempted to end their pregnancies unsuccessfully before eventually becoming mothers. Many had been abandoned by their partners, while others feared losing the support of their families altogether.

“Once the baby is born, they are confronted with an impossible choice: keeping their child or preserving the bond with their family,” she shared. Those encounters did not change the screenplay, they changed the way the 36-year-old actress understood the woman she was preparing to embody. “They profoundly shaped my understanding of Selma as a woman.”

In Morocco, premarital relations and abortion remain criminalized. For women who become pregnant outside marriage, that legal framework creates a vulnerability extending far beyond pregnancy itself. “This is Selma’s situation in the movie,” Kounda explains. “She is not fully protected by the law, and neither is her child. That’s what makes this story so important.”

Even after production wrapped, those conversations stayed with her. Kounda continued following the lives of several young mothers she had met during her research, watching them navigate parenthood while confronting financial hardship, stigma, and isolation. “I am obviously much more aware of the difficulty and violence of this situation since I have been closely following the daily lives of young women who fight alone every day to provide for their children’s needs,” she revealed.

Yet the University of Montreal graduate is careful not to reduce Selma to the circumstances surrounding her pregnancy. What drew her most strongly to the character was her emotional complexity. “Yes, Selma is deeply contradictory, just like all of us. We all long to love while trying to protect ourselves.”

For Kounda, one of the film’s quiet achievements is acknowledging something still rarely afforded to women on screen. “The film acknowledges something that is still rarely portrayed: female desire exists, and Selma’s choices, whether we agree with them or not, are her own.”

Selma believes in love. She dreams of building a family. At the same time, she remains deeply religious, refusing to abandon either her faith or her emotions. Or as Kounda puts it, “Her faith doesn’t disappear because she falls in love. It stays with her.”

Instead, rather than presenting those identities as opposites, the actress sees Selma’s journey as an attempt to reconcile them. “What makes her journey so moving is that she is constantly trying to reconcile these two parts of herself: her faith and her humanity.”

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Researching the role also forced Kounda to confront the point where Selma’s story diverges from the lives of the women she met. Many had chosen to continue their pregnancies despite the possibility of losing their homes, their families and their partners. Selma makes a different decision.

“Why does she decide not to continue her pregnancy even if she is an orphan, while these young women chose to keep their children despite everything they stood to lose?” she asks. “Exploring that difference became essential to my work.”

Still, she insists that the film cannot be understood without recognising that every one of Selma’s decisions is rooted in love. “Without that, I don’t think the character, or the film, can truly be understood,” she said. “Selma is defined neither by her desire, nor by her faith, nor by her pregnancy,” Kounda says. “She is a woman striving to preserve her dignity while navigating a profound moral, emotional, and social conflict.”

For her, dignity became the emotional centre of the performance. “What touched me most is that Selma never stops searching for dignity. She never stops trying to do what she believes is right, even when every option comes at a painful cost.”

Instead of expressing every feeling through dialogue, Kounda chose to let those emotions remain internal. “In her silence, she bore the weight of regret, guilt and bitterness.” When audiences tell her they understood Selma without words, it feels like confirmation that the performance achieved what she had hoped. “I’m glad you could feel Selma’s emotions through silence. This means a lot to me.”

That emotional precision was made possible by the relationship she built with Benm’Barek. Before filming, the two spent countless hours talking not only about Selma, but about romance itself. “Meryem and I are both hopeless romantics,” Kounda says. Their conversations drifted from the screenplay to films like Titanic and Dirty Dancing, revisiting first loves, heartbreaks, and the vulnerability of falling in love. “We almost felt like teenagers again, remembering our first heartbreaks and reflecting on what it means to fall in love.”

Those exchanges became essential to building trust between actor and director. “We needed to trust each other completely in order to explore those intimate questions honestly. It was fascinating to watch her direct some of the film’s most emotional scenes, moving effortlessly between the emotional worlds of both the female and male characters,” she continued.

Only later did she discover that Benm’Barek had originally trained as an actress. “Suddenly everything made sense,” she recalls. “She has a very instinctive way of directing actors because she understands exactly what it feels like to be in front of the camera.” One day, she hopes they will share the screen instead.

The experience of making Behind the Palm Trees also coincided with a profoundly personal moment in Kounda’s own life. While Selma faces pregnancy in isolation, Kounda was breastfeeding her second child throughout production. “I was breastfeeding my second child while filming Behind the Palm Trees. I was in the middle of my postpartum journey, and that inevitably changed the way I experienced Selma.”

Having become a mother herself, she found herself thinking constantly about the child at the center of the story. “It made Selma’s story feel incredibly personal,” she shares. “I found it heartbreaking that, at the very moment when both a mother and her newborn need the most care, some are instead met with isolation, fear, and stigma,” she added.

What affected her most was the absence of safe choices available to many women. “When society offers no protection, they can find themselves making desperate choices, just as Selma does.” And, she adds, it is not only women who bear those consequences. “It is also innocent children who begin their lives carrying the consequences of that vulnerability.”

This year, Kounda appears in four films released within months of one another: The Ants, Thank You Satan, L’Héritier des Secrets, and Behind the Palm Trees. Looking back, she realized they all revolve around motherhood in different ways. “Whether it’s the desire to become a mother, the fear of motherhood, the absence of a mother, or the responsibility of being one, that theme keeps finding me.”

She doesn’t see that as coincidence. “Becoming a mother myself has profoundly changed the way I approach these characters. Today, I feel I can embrace all their contradictions with more empathy and without judgment.”

Rather than changing her career, she believes the past year has simply clarified the stories she is meant to tell. That voice is now guiding both her acting and her first documentary, currently in development. “For the first time, I feel that my work in front of the camera and behind it are becoming part of the same artistic journey.”

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Asked what she still feels is missing from Moroccan cinema, Kounda doesn’t hesitate. “I think what is still missing is complexity.” Too often, she argues, Moroccan women are portrayed through extremes—either as victims or as symbols of strength—but rarely as “contradictory, deeply human individuals.”

She is especially interested in exploring the emotional terrain between mothers and daughters. “I’m fascinated by mother-daughter relationships. They’re often full of love, but also silence, guilt, sacrifice, and misunderstanding.” Those relationships, she believes, reveal how patriarchy, sexuality, and social expectations shape women’s lives across generations.

One of the films that continues to inspire her is Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother, precisely because it refuses to judge either the mother or the child at its center. “I’d love to bring that same emotional honesty to stories rooted in Moroccan and Arab culture.”

For Kounda, that honesty also reflects the reality of her own generation. “Many of us are becoming parents while confronting our own childhood wounds at the same time.”

It is that tension—raising children while learning how to heal yourself—that she hopes to continue exploring, both as an actress and as a filmmaker. Like Selma herself, those stories are not interested in simple answers. They embrace contradiction, allowing women to exist beyond the roles society expects them to play.

Moroccan Actress Nadia Kounda on Motherhood, Female Desire, and Behind the Palm Trees

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Moroccan Actress Nadia Kounda on Motherhood, Female Desire, and Behind the Palm Trees

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