During the pandemic lockdown, when the world seemed to stop, I sat in my home office in our new house in Folkestone, the first time I had ever had a room to write in. Surrounded by my books, I began, tentatively, to put the first words on the page of what would eventually become my screenwriting and directorial debut, Beneath a Mother’s Feet.
Fast forward six years. The film was made, and its journey through festivals has now come to an end after nearly two years.
It’s only now, with some distance from the film’s time on the festival circuit, that I feel able to look back at its making without being caught up in its forward motion. That distance has shifted my relationship to the work, and to myself in relation to it.
Beneath a Mother’s Feet is a short film inspired by my own familial narrative. It centres on Wedad, a single mother in Morocco living with her parents and children in a situation that has become untenable, and follows the period leading up to her decision to leave. The film stays with the pressure of that moment rather than its aftermath, neither approving nor condemning the decision taken by its protagonist, but asking us instead to sit with something unresolved. For me, that unresolved space holds the pain of the decision, but also its courage, and the weight of choosing in full knowledge of the stigma it would carry.
More specifically, the film draws on real events in my mother’s life, but it isn’t my attempt to explain her or to put the past to rest. I didn’t want to make a biopic. I wanted to reconstruct something more uncertain: how memory distorts and reforms, how some moments become charged with meaning long after they’ve passed, while others slip away almost completely.
The film was pieced together like zellij, from stories that had been passed down and retold in different ways, from specific photographic artefacts, from my own sensory memories of childhood summers spent in Morocco with my grandparents in their small one-room bungalow in M’diq, and from the folkloric tales I grew up with around the djinn, stories every Moroccan family seems to carry in one form or another, where superstition and the everyday coexist without contradiction. As I pieced the story together, these elements seemed to sit alongside one another rather than resolve into a single perspective, and that felt closer to how the past actually operates for me.
At first, Beneath a Mother’s Feet was conceived as a feature. Writing was not something I had done seriously before, and those early, tentative taps on the keyboard felt both difficult and exposing. I applied to, and was accepted into, a small selection of development programmes, which gave me the confidence to keep going with this story. Over time, something shifted in me; I stopped approaching writing as a way of searching for answers, as though the act itself might resolve the story for me. Instead, I began to accept that ambiguity and not knowing were not problems to be solved, but qualities to be embraced as central to the story itself.
So these development programmes - the SAFAR Arab Film Development Programme led by Saeed Taji Farouky, and the BFI Network Short Film Development Programme - helped me begin, but the work itself only really took shape once I stopped treating uncertainty as something to overcome and recognised it as part of the process.
To make the short film, I had to condense the story, which meant choosing what to let go of. Instinctively, I focused on a narrow window of time: the thirty-six hours leading up to the moment this single mother leaves her life behind. That compression allowed me to pay closer attention to small, everyday details that might otherwise have been lost. Through the process of making the film, I came to understand that these seemingly mundane moments are what interest me most. It is often there, in the smallest gestures and routines, that our stories actually live.
More recently, with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve come to realise that how the film was made mattered almost as much to me as what it depicted. I wrote a screenplay, but I treated it as a framework rather than something fixed or inviolable. Although scripted lines existed on the page, much of the dialogue ultimately emerged through a process of semi-improvisation.
Nisrine Adam, who played Wedad, was the only professionally trained actor in the film. The other performers were non-professional actors, chosen carefully and then trusted to bring themselves into their roles. I was interested in what might surface if people were allowed to inhabit situations rather than deliver lines.
Improvisation is often associated with excessive dialogue or over-explanation, but that wasn’t what I was drawn to. I wanted restraint, silence, and space for what isn’t said, because that feels closer to how people actually communicate with one another. With each take, the choreography of the scenes grew more precise as the performers became more attuned to one another. This was particularly evident in the dinner table scene, which was inspired by something my mother once described, although the real event, as she recounted it to me, was more dramatic. We worked toward something more restrained, with a sense of pressure beneath the surface. Small, unplanned moments emerged, and they gave the scene its shape.
Making the film taught me how much I value this way of working, how it opens space for something unexpected to surface, something I could not have planned for or written in advance. It meant trusting the process enough to loosen control without losing intention, and to accept that some things could only be discovered in the doing.
Once the film was completed and began travelling, it took on a life beyond my intentions. Screenings and the conversations that followed became part of the work itself, with people responding through the lens of their own lives. Some felt a deep empathy for Wedad. Others could not reconcile her decision at all. A mother does not leave her children. That response surfaced repeatedly, in different forms and in different places, and each time it returned me to the question I had been circling from the beginning: why certain choices are judged more harshly when they are made by mothers, why responsibility is distributed unevenly, and why leaving is framed as abandonment in some cases and as absence in others.
The film received recognition along the way, which signalled to me that the work was being engaged with seriously. Even so, recognition doesn’t settle everything. There is often a lag between making something and feeling at ease with what that making allows you to become.
Even now, calling myself a writer and director doesn’t come easily. There is a difference between doing the work and feeling the words settle in your mouth. I’ve done the former. The latter is still catching up.
My attention has begun to shift toward what comes next. I want the film to reach a wider audience beyond festival contexts, to find a life online and through broadcast spaces where it can continue to be encountered on its own terms. At the same time, my thinking has moved beyond this single project. Beneath a Mother’s Feet doesn’t feel like an ending, but part of a longer enquiry I’m still engaged in, one that continues to move between Morocco and the UK, and between past experience and present work.
What this film has given me is a clearer sense of the kind of work I want to pursue. Work that resists simple moral accounting, allows contradiction to remain visible, and trusts an audience to meet it without being told how to feel.
I’m still finding my way into the work and into myself through it, and for now that feels enough.