‘Animalia’ Director Sofia Alaoui on TV Project ‘Let the Earth Burn,’ About Kidnappings of Children Used in Moroccan Witchcraft Rituals

variety.com:

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent French-Moroccan director Sofia Alaoui made a splash at Sundance with her sci-fi thriller “Animalia,” which used genre to explore dark sides of Moroccan society.

The filmmaker is now employing similar tropes in the early stages on a TV series titled “Let the Earth Burn.” “Animalia,” winner of the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision within Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, is about a pregnant young woman from a rural Berber background who winds up emancipating herself as aliens land in Morocco. “Let the Earth Burn,” unveiled during the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra Arab film and TV series projects incubator this week, takes its cue from real abductions and slayings in remote areas of Morocco of kids known as “Zouhri” whom the kidnappers believe have supernatural powers. “I read about these kidnappings in the newspaper, and I thought, ‘This is crazy!'” Alaoui told Variety. “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.” In “Let The Earth Burn,” a rookie female police academy graduate named Kenza is posted to a remote station in a small town in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains.

Surrounded by misogynistic, unwilling colleagues, Kenza learns, despite their indifferences, that some shepherds’ children have gone missing and decides to investigate.