Fez — The Red Sea Fund has selected Moroccan filmmaker Sofia Alaoui’s next feature “Tarfaya” among creative projects to benefit from production support during its second funding cycle of 2026.
The Fund announced the selection on September 28 as part of 30 projects backed across its first two cycles this year. The two rounds attracted 916 submissions, including 696 applications for the production-focused second cycle. Seventeen projects were selected from that pool.
“Tarfaya” appears among projects from Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, the Philippines, South Africa, Lebanon, Turkey, China, and other countries.
𝗔 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗱𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗰𝗼
Set in the near future, “Tarfaya” takes place in the southern Moroccan city as worsening climate conditions bring frequent sandstorms and a mysterious illness.
The story centers on Meryem, a doctor working at the regional hospital who begins encountering patients falling into an unexplained deep sleep. As the illness spreads, the medical mystery becomes increasingly personal and destabilizing.
Project materials from the Doha Film Institute describe coughing, fever, shared dreams, isolation camps, and the growing relationship between Meryem and a younger doctor named Adel.
The setting allows Alaoui to return to territory familiar from her earlier work, where the supernatural and speculative become ways of examining social anxieties, isolation, and the fragility of everyday life.
𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 ‘𝗔𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗮’ 𝘁𝗼 ‘𝗧𝗮𝗿𝗳𝗮𝘆𝗮’
Alaoui previously directed “Animalia,” her first feature, after gaining international attention with the short “So What If the Goats Die,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2020 and later the César for Best Short Film.
The Festival de Cannes currently describes “Tarfaya” as Alaoui’s next film and a science-fiction drama centered on a strange disease. Alaoui developed the project during her time at La Résidence du Festival de Cannes.
Cannes materials identify “Tarfaya” as a Morocco-France-Belgium production with a planned shooting location in Morocco.
The latest Red Sea Fund announcement lists Sofia Alaoui and Annabella Nezri as directors and both among the project’s producers. Earlier Cannes and Doha materials identify Alaoui as director and Nezri as a producer or co-producer, leaving a discrepancy in the currently available project credits.
The new funding support represents another step in a project that has been developing across international film programs while remaining firmly rooted in southern Morocco.
Its combination of climate anxiety, illness, romance, and speculative storytelling also continues Alaoui’s broader interest in using genre cinema to look at contemporary Moroccan realities from less expected angles.
