Art & Culture

Zhor Fassi Fihri Is Making the Moroccan Films She Wants to See

BYKhaoula Ghanem

August 17, 2026

Long before Zhor Fassi Fihri had a production company of her own, before she was financing films, navigating sets, and spending six years fighting to get a single project made, she was a shy child who preferred being behind the camera. She and her sister and cousins would make action movies together, with Fassi Fihri either filming or conveniently casting herself as the villain. At eight, she directed a play at school. At home, there was Tarantino and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, followed a few years later by the film that confirmed something she’d always, perhaps subconsciously, suspected.

“I discovered Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!. I was captivated by the world of musical theatre, the performances, and the richness of its art direction. At that moment, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in filmmaking,” the Moroccan director and producer recalls to MILLE. “To this day, Baz Luhrmann’s creativity and bold vision continue to fascinate me. From then on, filmmaking became the obvious path for me.”

Obvious to Fassi Fihri, perhaps, but still difficult to say out loud. Her sisters were studying law, and for a time, she assumed she should do the same. Cinema belonged to a more precarious category of ambition. Her parents, however, had noticed her artistic instincts long before she trusted them herself. So, her mother took matters into her own hands, secretly submitting applications to film schools in Paris on her daughter’s behalf. One summer morning, she woke Fassi Fihri with the news that she had been invited to sit entrance exams and interviews. “I was confused, overwhelmed, and incredibly happy all at once. That moment changed the direction of my life,” she says. “I always say that when your parents believe in you, they give you the strength to pursue your dreams and to approach your work with passion and love.”

Fassi Fihri had moved to France earlier for personal reasons, completing part of high school in the country and spending years traveling between France and Morocco. In France, she found permission to take her artistic impulses seriously. She describes feeling freer to be herself there, in a culture where creative professions carried an institutional and social legitimacy she did not always feel in Morocco. Yet the experience never pushed her toward choosing one country over the other. Instead, living between them became fundamental to the filmmaker she would become.

She always intended to direct, but the film industry has a way of making young filmmakers learn the distance between wanting to make something and persuading somebody to pay for it. As rejections accumulated and doors closed, Fassi Fihri began to understand that creative independence would require more than knowing what she wanted a film to look or feel like. She would have to understand how films actually get made. “After facing several rejections and closed doors, I quickly realized that I first needed to become a producer. I wanted to understand the other side of the profession so that, one day, I could produce my own work and carry my creative vision through to completion,” she says. “Directing and producing bring me two very different kinds of fulfilment, but I find both equally exciting and rewarding,” she adds.

By then, Fassi Fihri had already learned the industry from several angles. After studying at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français, she worked at Canal+ in France and later helped launch a Paris-based news channel dedicated to Africa. The experience gave her an education in the machinery surrounding the images she wanted to make, but it also brought her to a breaking point. After years working as an employee, she reached burnout, an experience that sharpened her desire for independence. “After that experience, I made a promise to myself: from then on, I would dedicate all that energy to my own projects,” she says.

That promise eventually became Z Films, which she founded at the end of 2018, shortly before COVID-19 brought the industry into a standstill. The independent audiovisual and film production company would go on to operate across film, television, advertising, and international productions, with Fassi Fihri serving as executive producer on the Dutch feature De Mooiste Dag and the French version of Netflix’s Love Is Blind, alongside collaborations with production companies including Fremantle, M6, and La Grosse Équipe on projects filmed in the North African kingdom.

It was during the pandemic that she directed her first feature, The Moderator, an action thriller starring Gary Dourdan and Robert Knepper. Fassi Fihri also produced the film, which was distributed by Saban Films and released theatrically in the United States in 2022 before becoming available on streaming platforms. “I often say that even during the most difficult times, we, as artists, will always find ways to keep creating,” she notes of the timing. “Certain energies accompany us and guide us towards the path that is truly meant for us. This experience taught me that hardship can sometimes lead us exactly where we are supposed to be.”

Her ambitions at Z Films have since extended beyond her own directing work. Fassi Fihri has made supporting emerging filmmakers part of the company’s practice, backing a short film or music video each year. In 2024, Paraboles, a short by Hiba Baddou that she produced, won several prizes, including the Art for Change Prize at London’s Saatchi Gallery. That investment in other filmmakers sits naturally alongside the larger argument Fassi Fihri makes about Moroccan cinema throughout our conversation. Building an industry, in her view, requires more than making her own films. It means creating enough space, work, and resources for other people to make theirs, too.

When she returned home, she felt a responsibility to bring back some of the artistic freedom she had experienced in France. Morocco, after all, already possessed much of the infrastructure and technical expertise required to make ambitious cinema. International productions have long understood this, with films including Gladiator and The Odyssey shooting in the country. What frustrated Fassi Fihri was the gap between Morocco’s ability to help realize other people’s cinematic worlds and the resources available for its filmmakers to construct their own. “We have exceptionally skilled technicians who are capable of working on major films of international scope. I therefore felt it was a shame that these same talents were not more often given the opportunity to contribute to ambitious Moroccan films—films that reflect our stories, our identity, and our vision,” she explains.

Her ambition is to make films that are “made in Morocco” while conceived for audiences beyond it, bringing Moroccan actors and international talent into the same frame rather than treating local and global cinema as separate propositions.

The Morocco she returned to in 2015 was not immediately easy to navigate. After producing television films and advertising campaigns, the old childhood sensation of feeling different returned. Working methods were unfamiliar, and she had to learn the industry by observing it from inside. Eventually, she found a generation of young Moroccan artists she describes as exceptionally talented, even as financing remained stubbornly difficult. Executive production became one way of subsidizing her own films and maintaining greater control over what she could make.

That question of money appears repeatedly when Fassi Fihri talks about Moroccan cinema, because for her it determines which stories are allowed to become images. She dreams of seeing Morocco’s centuries of history given the scale of the international epics routinely filmed on its soil. The Idrisids, Almoravids, Almohads, Marinids, Saadians, and Alaouites offer generations of material, while figures such as Zaynab an-Nafzawiyya, Fatima al-Fihriya, Princess Fannu, and Sayyida al-Hurra could inspire compelling stories with universal appeal. “Morocco has welcomed major international productions for decades; my dream is to see those same locations, technical expertise, and creative ambition devoted to bringing our own stories to the screen,” the producer shares.

For now, much of that ambition has been concentrated into her latest film, L’Homme des Signes, inspired by the life of Franco-Moroccan painter Mehdi Qotbi. His biography felt immediately familiar to Fassi Fihri, who recognized in his life between France and Morocco something of her own relationship to identity and belonging. She both directed and produced the film, a combination that gave her considerable control but also required a degree of personal investment that goes well beyond the abstract language of creative risk. “It can be difficult to manage, but it is one of the sacrifices I am willing to make to bring my projects and my vision of cinema to life,” she admits.

L’Homme des Signes took six years to develop. Six years of convincing people, finding resources, persisting through uncertainty, and continuing to believe that an unfinished film deserved that much of her life. Fassi Fihri says she grew alongside it. Now in post-production and scheduled for theatrical release in mid-2027, it has become evidence of how stubbornly she is willing to pursue an idea. “My greatest source of pride is undoubtedly my patience and my determination never to give up. I am deeply proud of what I have accomplished, and I do not regret any of the effort or sacrifices I made to see this journey through,” she says.

Autisto, directed by Jérôme Cohen-Olivar and scheduled for theatrical release in October, explores autism, a subject Fassi Fihri says is especially close to her heart. She wants Z Films to make work that can occupy the space between arthouse and mainstream cinema, retaining artistic conviction without regarding accessibility as a compromise. Festivals matter, but she is more interested in what happens when the film leaves them and encounters an audience.

Perhaps that’s why, when asked what directing has taught her about herself that producing never could, her answer is strikingly simple. “To feel alive, fulfilled, and free is, to me, the greatest feeling in the world,” she states.

It’s an unsurprising answer from someone whose career has been shaped by the practical work required to protect precisely that feeling. Fassi Fihri became a producer because she wanted to direct, founded a company because she wanted independence, returned to Morocco because she wanted to participate in building the cinema she believed the country was capable of making, and has been willing to finance that conviction herself when necessary. Even the child who hid behind the camera seems recognizable in the filmmaker she is now, except that now she stopped being afraid to claim the position behind it.

Zhor Fassi Fihri Is Making the Moroccan Films She Wants to See

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Zhor Fassi Fihri Is Making the Moroccan Films She Wants to See

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