Director and screenwriter Sofia Alaoui has signed with WME for representation in all areas. She continues to be represented by Jerome Duboz of Ithaka Media.
Born in Casablanca and raised in China, Alaoui is a French-Moroccan artist with an aim to create cinema that spans across borders and bends genres in new ways. After premiering her feature directorial debut, “Animalia” at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, Alaoui won a special jury prize for creative vision. The film is a science fiction film that’s rooted in realism with political themes.
Her short film “So What If The Goats Die,” which tells the story of an extraterrestrial invasion in Imilchil (a Berber village located in the Atlas Mountains), won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2020 and the César Award for Best Short Film in 2021.
Alaoui has since redirected her talents to TV and is now developing the series, “Let The Earth Burn” alongside Måns Mårlind (“The Bridge”). The series was unveiled during the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra Arab film and TV series projects incubator in March.
In a previous conversation with PvNew, Alaoui revealed the show was inspired by real kidnappings of children Morocco labeled as “Zouhri,” whom the kidnappers believe have special powers.
“I read about these kidnappings in the newspaper, and I thought, ‘This is crazy!’” Alaoui said at the time. “The [medieval] practice is that they sacrifice these young children in order to gain some supernatural force themselves. I said to myself: how can this still exist? And I wondered whether these crimes say something about the society.”
