“Don’t Let the Solar Go Up on Me”, “La Más Dulce,” and “Chapa 100” claimed the highest postproduction and growth prizes at this 12 months’s Atlas Workshops, which ran from Nov. 30 – Dec. 5 as a part of the Marrakech Movie Pageant.
Co-winner of the highest award, “Don’t Let the Solar Go Up on Me” walked away with a €20,000 post-production grant. Directed by Asmae El Moudir, the movie retraces the lifetime of Fatimazahra, a younger girl born with a uncommon genetic dysfunction that made publicity to daylight lethal. She lived a parallel, nocturnal existence and based a group generally known as the Youngsters of the Moon. Following her loss of life in 2023, the group traveled to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to dwell beneath the polar night time, looking for a world the place darkness affords security.
“We’re speaking a couple of uncommon illness with a really robust antagonist: the solar,” says El Moudir. “What usually represents pleasure turns into a supply of hazard. For this group, gentle can kill. In that sense, the mission is sort of a vampire movie made actual. We’re exploring how this hidden group lives amongst us — a group most individuals don’t even know exists — however I don’t need to painting them as victims.”
That is the second time El Moudir received the Atlas Workshops’ primary grant. Her earlier effort, “The Mom of All Lies,” would later rating Cannes’ greatest documentary award, in addition to the Un Sure Regard directing prize, earlier than making historical past as the primary Moroccan movie to win Marrakech’s Etoile d’Or. The filmmaker stays an Atlas Workshops’ emblematic success story – and she or he’ll quickly be again behind the digicam for a second bout of manufacturing forward of a 2027 supply.
Put up-productions jurors Beatrice Fiorentino (Settimana Internazionale della Critica), Martin Gondre (Greatest Mates Ceaselessly), and Hania Mroué (Metropolis) determined to provide two high prizes, additionally awarding €20,000 to Laila Marrakchi’s “La Mas Dulce,” a narrative about agricultural exploitation in Andulusia, following a pair of Moroccan ladies employed for a season of strawberry choosing.
“The movie reveals their braveness, their dedication, and their wrestle to denounce the injustices and abuses they endure,” says Marrakchi in her director’s assertion. “It additionally exhibits that, regardless of the preliminary promise of freedom and monetary independence that results in pressured exile that in the end distances them from their households and their nation, an unbreakable bond is fashioned between them.”
Fortunate Quantity handles world gross sales, with a 2026 pageant berth extremely seemingly.
Rounding out the post-production winners, director Mohammed Hammad’s “Protected Exit” and “Goma Sufficient Is Sufficient,” from filmmaker Elisé Sawasawa, claimed €10,000 grants. Hammad’s “Protected Exit” follows a safety guard scuffling with PTSD within the aftermath of a 2015 ISIS bloodbath, whereas Sawasawa’s doc follows the on a regular basis Congolese who picked up arms to defend their households after town of Goma fell to rebels this previous January.
On the event facet, high honors went to Ique Langa’s “Chapa 100,” a love-story between ageing road distributors in Mozambique that quickly assumes extra magical realist and poetic dimensions. The filmmaker acquired €30,000. That is Langa’s second function; his debut “The Prophet” is predicted to make a pageant debut in 2026.
Improvement jurors Karim Aïtouna (Haut les Mains Productions), Ama Ampadu (BFI Filmmaking Fund) and Olivier Père (Arte France) additionally awarded €10,000 to Boubacar Sangaré’s “Les Dieux Delinquants,” and €5000 to each Scandar Copti’s “A Childhood” and Kamy Lara’s “Vanda.”
The awards capped a second consecutive 12 months of development for the workshops, which welcomed 60 distributors from throughout the Center East and North Africa via the newly launched Atlas Distribution Conferences.
“These distribution professionals aren’t at all times current at main worldwide markets, and when they’re, they’re few in quantity and never essentially a high precedence for pressured gross sales brokers,” says Atlas director Hédi Zardi.
He notes that European and Arab distributors even requested to satisfy merely as colleagues. “I noticed a Lebanese distributor chatting with a Polish one — they don’t have anything to promote one another, but had been keen to speak. That’s precisely what we hoped for: placing everybody in the identical area to spark dialog. Offers could come later, however the principle objective was for them to satisfy and uncover issues collectively.”
Regardless of the inflow of distributors, total trade attendance stayed according to earlier editions — and the Atlas chief prefers it that means.
“We should keep boutique,” says Zardi. “We would like these casual encounters to occur naturally. If we lose freshness and spontaneity, we lose our essence. Some individuals who got here the primary 12 months returned later and advised us it feels precisely the identical — and we have to protect that whereas bettering every time. We’ve reached our desired scale.”
This 12 months’s mentor was Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, who left his mentees with this recommendation: “Don’t overdevelop.”
“It’s great to get suggestions, and even higher to obtain growth funding, however don’t spend years in growth. We’re desirous to see your movies!”
He later adopted as much as Selection: “I consider cinema has the facility to problem the stereotypes so usually utilized to folks or areas we all know too little about. From this angle, Atlas makes a big contribution to the visibility of an enchanting a part of the world. If we watch extra movies from this area, we could uncover that we’re not so completely different in spite of everything.”
Since 2018, the workshops have supported 180 tasks, amongst them greater than 70 Moroccan movies. Because the post-production prize was launched in 2020, the highest winners have all gone on to premiere in Cannes or Berlin, with respective victors “Feathers” and “The Mom of all Lies” gathering prizes out of Critics’ Week and Un Sure Regard.
