Horses of God directed by Nabil Ayouch (review)

On May 16, 2003, fourteen suicide bombers from a Casablanca shantytown attacked five separate locations in the center of the city, killing forty-four people. Horses of God tells of desperately poor Moroccan youths who found their home in the Islamist underground and were eventually recruited to carry out the bombings, all the while learning of the rewards awaiting them in paradise. The film, an official selection at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, is powerful, its story complex, the characters subtly drawn.

Nabil Ayouch is the foremost Moroccan director as well as a major film producer, best known for Ali Zaoua, Prince of the Streets (2000), the story of street children in Casablanca. The 2003 suicide bombers came from the very shantytown, Sidi Moumen, where Ayouch had recruited the children actors for Ali Zaoua. He returned there, spending two years getting to know its residents and the local NGOs. He also worked with sociologists and political scientists and spent a month with an Islamist preacher who had been released from jail in 2011. He brought ex-Islamists to oversee the shooting and cast nonprofessional actors from Sidi Moumen in the film’s major roles as he sought to make the film as realistic and credible as possible. While preparing the film, Ayouch learned about a novel being completed on the very same topic by the distinguished Moroccan writer Mahi Binebjine (Les étoiles de Sidi Moumen / Horses of God, 2013) and adopted that story (personal interview, 2013).

Horses of God shows the human face of terrorism as it weaves together the lives of several adolescents coming of age in Sidi Moumen during the decade before 2003. The film depicts a shantytown abandoned by the authorities, who provide neither education, running water, nor urban planning, and in which the only public presence is the brutal and corrupt police. Families are in disarray, barely managing to make a living. The adolescents find little love and affection at home, the relationships with their peers are marked by brutality and violence, and their future prospects are dismal. Islamists play the role of the state in offering social services such as medical care and basic food for the shantytown’s residents. They offer the disaffected adolescents a supportive community, provide them with opportunities to make a living, and engage them in their teachings. For the first time, these young Moroccans find self-respect and dignity. Eventually some of them are chosen for the suicide operation, as the leader of the Islamists calls on them to “Fly, horses of God, and the gates of paradise will open for you.”

As a postscript, one might add that Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005) draws a quite different portrait of two Palestinian suicide bombers, who are well integrated young men, long committed to giving their lives for the cause if called upon. Contrary to its title, the film focuses on the experiences of these men living under Israeli occupation, and the final preparations for their mission emphasize its nationalist character rather than any religious dimension. It would be an interesting film to screen alongside Horses of God.