Simple, staggering sadness saturates the story of Mourad Lebadi (Hmed Khribesh as the child Mourad and Okba Rian as the adult), led back to Morocco to collect what’s left of his mother’s life, a mother (Naima Bouzio) who he wasn’t able to know beyond his young years. Nils Kenaston’s cinematography is a life once unreachable, as Mourad walks through formerly familiar locales, and the colors all around almost sense Mourad’s reason for returning. In his younger years, he is insistent about staying with his mother in the same room, despite her question to him about maybe having his own room. As a child, he doesn’t realize what his mother truly meant until it faces him. As an adult, he knows all too well. Tala Hadid knows it too, as she and Okba Rian make the painful present journey one to remember, not only of how little time we get to be with the ones we love, but who we are through the people we knew.
