Between love and social fracture, Behind the Palm Trees, by Meryem Benm’Barek, explores the invisible tensions that run through contemporary Tangier.
Mehdi, an architect forced to work on the construction sites of the Kasbah of Tangier, loves Selma, a saleswoman in a pastry shop. But everything wavers when he meets Marie, a French woman from a wealthy family, whose second home in Tangier he has just restored.
Obviously, Meryem Benm’Barek does not settle for a simple love triangle. For her second feature film, the director continues in the vein of an intimate and social cinema that characterized Sofia, where she addressed the taboo of pregnancies out of wedlock.
In Behind the Palm Trees, the romance shifts towards the tragic, revealing an implacable mechanic: that of class inequalities, postcolonial relations, and a diffuse racism that assigns everyone their place.
Mehdi finds himself caught between desire, social frustration, and the vertigo of possibilities. How far can he go to cross this “almost nothing” that separates him from his dreams? This is precisely where the film unleashes all its power.
Behind the Palm Trees, by Meryem Benm’Barek – in theaters since April 1st.
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