Close encounters in the Atlas mountains: Sofia Alaoui on her haunting debut Animalia

In French-Moroccan writer-director Sofia Alaoui’s debut Animalia, Itto (Oumaima Barid) is alone in her remote home in Morocco when strange things begin to happen – ominous clouds, animals acting differently, phone lines and electricity flickering in and out. As panic grows and her housekeepers desert her, Itto packs wads of cash in a small bag and sets out to meet her husband in Khouribga. 

She’s dressed sleekly in beige with glints of gold jewellery, but Itto’s affluence is quickly revealed as pointless in this context: her Amazigh (Berber) background emerges in the language she slips into, to convince hostel owner Fouad (Fouad Oughaou) to drive her. En route, and with a disarming young shepherd in tow, the trio’s experience in the eye of the storm provides one of the film’s most enigmatic moments, their close proximity emboldening Fouad to reprimand Itto’s newly moneyed status by suggesting that money is ‘God’ to the rich. 

We spoke to Alaoui about this rich commentary on class, indigeneity and the unknown – a stunning piece of cinema that doesn’t shy away from the mysteries of the universe. 

Elhum Shakerifar: The film opens in a space of community, with the laughter of women who are comfortable in each other’s company. But their joy is hushed with the appearance of the lady of the house, Itto’s mother-in-law. As the camera zooms out to reveal an opulent and meticulously manicured house, we understand that class quietly underpins the fraught relationship between Itto and her new family.

Sofia Alaoui: The issue of class judgement is as old as the world, and unfortunately still very present. This form of contempt from the top down, or the anger rising from the bottom up, creates deep fractures. It is not only about economic differences, but about perception, legitimacy and belonging. And these dividing lines not only cut through a country, they run through families themselves. In the film, even around the same table, ‘living together’ is fragile, often superficial. People judge, protect themselves, compare, and the personal becomes political. This silent tension is precisely what I wanted to explore.

Itto is pregnant, but the promise of motherhood comes with a pinprick of unease, as strange events begin to occur. These could be called science fiction, otherworldly or something more akin to mysticism. How does pregnancy inform Itto’s attunement to the situation?

There is something undeniably magical about pregnancy – at least that is how I experienced it myself after writing the film. This strange and foreign body forming inside us, shaping itself without us doing anything, feels like a form of magic. It is both deeply physical and completely beyond us, and there is a kind of mysticism in that paradox. You become aware of life not only as a biological process but as something larger, something that moves through us.

During pregnancy, the boundary between the visible and the invisible becomes blurred. You feel everything more sharply – the atmosphere, the quiet tensions in a room, the unspoken. You are vulnerable but also incredibly attuned. That sensibility naturally informed Itto’s connection to the world around her, to nature, to the animals, and to what cannot be explained rationally. It is less about the supernatural as an external force and more about how a body in transformation can open a door to new perceptions.

So the film doesn’t draw a line between science fiction, mysticism or intuition, because for many women – especially in pregnancy – those realms overlap. The experience is visceral and metaphysical at the same time. And I found that to be a very rich territory to explore through cinema.

Itto exists in a man’s world, a patriarchal society. Could you say a little more about the male protagonists? For instance, Fouad helps Itto but also challenges her faith, while her husband Amine (Mehdi Dehbi) is entwined with a world of privilege, power and appearances, but also has a vulnerability that Itto sees and attempts to nurture.

Moroccan society is shaped by a pervasive patriarchal structure that suffocates both women and men. Women themselves often reproduce the very patterns that limit them, because these systems are deeply rooted. For me, the film is simply a way to depict Morocco as truthfully as possible, without making it the subject of the film. Itto was written quite intuitively, simply because I am a woman living in Morocco and I wanted to portray a character in her complexity. I struggle with stereotypical narratives of emancipation, where the ‘rebellious’ woman is portrayed as loud, aggressive or masculine, and the ‘fragile’ woman as gentle and passive. There are far too many archetypes like these. Itto embraces ambivalence within herself. I believe we all do. We are never just one thing; we shift, evolve, contradict ourselves, sometimes even from one moment to the next.

The area of the Atlas mountains, where this affluent family lives, is a character in and of itself. This was also the location of your award-winning short film So What if the Goats Die (2020). What inspires you about this setting?

I was looking for a place that speaks directly to our unconscious. Landscapes have their own language, and the Atlas mountains, with their almost lunar plains and absence of trees, carry a kind of science-fiction quality that immediately invites introspection. In such a vast, raw space, you cannot escape the sense of your own smallness, the immensity of the universe, and the metaphysical questions that come with it. Setting the story in a city would never have carried the same meaning.

There is a strong symbolic dimension in this environment for me. I am drawn to art as a space where metaphor can live, quietly or boldly. The landscape becomes more than a backdrop: it becomes a mirror, a character, and sometimes even a question. The viewer who wants to go there, to play with that layer, will find space to do so in the film.

Given the incredible presence of ants, birds, sheep, dogs etc in the film, how did you wrangle working with so many animals?

I was a bit naive at the writing stage, because many of the animals we had on set were not trained at all. So we had to adapt to them, rather than expect them to adapt to us. Accepting that lack of control was humbling and, in the end, a real lesson.  

To be honest, I found working with animals far easier than working with humans. Human beings are infinitely more complicated, unpredictable, layered. Maybe that’s why we make films – to try to understand one another, to make sense of what we can’t always say. In many ways, the human is far more challenging than the animal.

Animalia is in cinemas from 12 December.