Fez — In 2017, Moroccan-Italian filmmaker Yassine Marco Marroccu showed producer Andrea Taschler a manuscript written by his grandfather, Edoardo Marroccu. Nine years later, a man who bears his grandfather’s first name sets out from Casablanca in a modified Renault 4. Somewhere on the Atlantic coast, a merchant ship and its crew have disappeared.
The car, the missing vessel, and the journey belong to “Alkebulan,” Marroccu’s second feature. Hungary’s National Film Institute announced on November 4 that the film will have its world premiere in competition at the Marrakech International Film Festival, which runs November 20–28.
The institute identifies the grandfather’s diaries as the basis for the film. How closely individual episodes follow his account remains an open question.
Two men looking for different things
The story begins in the spring of 1961. Edoardo Manidoru, a 43-year-old widower, accepts a commission to find the “Talassim.” His friend Aziz joins him for the drive south toward Cape Juby. For Edoardo, the assignment offers a reason to leave Casablanca after his wife’s death.
Another traveler has a claim on whatever they might find. Amastan, a young Tuareg spiritual leader, is looking for a sacred amulet stolen from his community. The men’s paths converge at a sanctuary on the coast. The Doha Film Institute follows both journeys in its account of the film. For the man setting out from Casablanca, the mystery begins with a lost ship. For Amastan, it begins with a theft.
The ship once had another name
Marrakech has a record of the story at an earlier stage. In 2020, the festival’s Atlas Workshops listed the project as Scirocco or “The Pilarica Adventure.” The missing ship was then called the Pilarica. Edoardo was already 43, already in Casablanca, and already headed for Cape Juby. In that version, however, his wife had left him. By the time the film took shape, Marroccu had given the voyage a different source of grief.
Filming took place in four stretches between May 2022 and September 2023. The Moroccan locations included the dunes of M’hamid and the sanctuary of Amtoudi, where the production brought together professional actors and Sahrawi and Tuareg performers. For the scenes of Edoardo’s childhood in Italy, the crew worked in Hungary.
When “Alkebulan” returns to Marrakech this month, six years will have passed since the festival first introduced the project. Across two titles, two names for the ship, and two accounts of why its hero leaves home, one detail has held: the grandfather who wrote the manuscript and the traveler who gets behind the wheel both answer to Edoardo.