The herbs in the basket

Part of an ongoing development journal for The Ogress of Fez, a feature drama about Oum El Hassen and the intersecting forces of empire, gender, and violence. Learn more.

Some time ago, in this project’s very early genesis during a lab - I was told, quite abruptly by someone respected within the industry in Morocco - that Moroccans wouldn’t want this film. That no one would want to play Oum. That colonial stories are tired, that audiences want something else. I understand the impulse - the desire for narratives that don’t always return to female subjugation, colonialism, or religion. But I don’t accept the conclusion.

Because how can colonial stories be tired when the effects of colonialism are still with us, rippling forward in politics, in economics, in gendered hierarchies, in the very structures of everyday life?

Oum’s life was grafted onto the colonial machinery that contained her - to attempt to prise one from the other would be like flaying skin from flesh. The story of Oum is inseparable from the time and system that shaped her. This isn’t a story about colonialism in an explicit sense, but rather it is the story’s bedrock… is is the air she breathed, the sediment beneath her choices, the architecture of power that made her trajectory possible. To pretend otherwise would be to strip her of context, to invent a version of her that never existed - a woman without the world that both sustained and destroyed her.

The colonial machinery didn’t just shape the outline of her life - it seeped into the most intimate spaces, down to how death itself was arranged. My thoughts return again and again to a particularly stark image from the records - the cadaver in a wicker basket, dismembered, packed with herbs… This detail appears in every account of the Oum El Hassen case I've read. It’s so haunting and mysterious to me. Court records from 1930s Morocco do not elaborate on the herbs - were they for preservation? Ritual? To mask the smell?

Charifa was the victim's name. She worked in Oum's brothel in Meknes, one of many women who died under suspicious circumstances. But it's that image - the basket, the herbs, the careful arrangement - that feels like a door into understanding who Oum really was. Not just a killer, but someone who approached murder with the same meticulous attention she once brought to adorning herself with jewellery, to managing her house, to cultivating relationships with French officers who might protect her.

And yet, every time I feel close to understanding her, she slips away from me…

She was born into poverty in Algeria, worked as a prostitute from childhood, followed French military columns during Morocco's "pacification." She was beautiful enough to attract officers as regular clients, elegant enough to be photographed with French celebrities. She spoke of sheltering soldiers during the Fez massacres and believed she might be awarded the Legion of Honour. Then her beauty faded, her status crumbled, and she began killing the women in her care.

This trajectory - victim to perpetrator, oppressed to oppressor - should be comprehensible. It fits familiar narratives about power’s corruptive capacity, about survival demanding sometimes terrible compromises. And yet, the real Oum eludes that kind of psychological coherence.

Oum was simultaneously a legend and a nobody, a heroine and a murderer, a collaborator and a victim. She existed in the gaps between identities - Algerian in Morocco, Muslim in a French-controlled world, a woman wielding power in a system designed to destroy women like her. Maybe the incoherence is the point.

I keep circling back to the colonial brothel as a space of impossible contradictions. Colonial brothels were presented as regulation, as harm reduction, as a way to protect both the women and their clients. In reality, it was a machine for converting human desperation into profit and control. Women were photographed, catalogued, examined multiple times per week by French doctors. Their health was monitored not for their benefit but to protect French men from venereal disease.

The system turned women against each other by design. Madames like Oum were given just enough power to feel complicit, just enough status to separate them from the women they supervised. But that power was conditional, revocable, dependent on their continued usefulness to French authorities. When Oum aged out of desirability, when her utility expired, she was left with nothing except the architecture of control she had internalised.

Maybe that's what drove her to murder; not simple cruelty, but a desperate attempt to maintain authority in a world that was already discarding her. The herbs in the basket start to make sense from this perspective. They suggest someone trying to assert control over death itself, to organise chaos, to impose order on destruction.

Or maybe I'm overcomplicating it. Maybe she was just a damaged person who did terrible things under intolerable circumstances. The colonial context explains how she got there but doesn't excuse what she did. The women she killed were as trapped as she was, as desperate, as deserving of survival.

So the film begins with Charifa, the false protagonist, murdered by Oum. Later it asks something harder: that the audience finds, however faint, a trace of empathy for Oum herself. Not to redeem her, not to excuse her, but to face the fact that she was recognisably human even after having committed unforgivable acts. That’s where the challenge lies.

This moral ambiguity is what makes the story cinematically interesting and politically urgent. It resists easy categorisation. Oum can't be reduced to either victim or villain because she was authentically both. The colonial system created these impossible positions, then abandoned the people caught in them.

I want the film to sit in that discomfort rather than resolving it. To show how systems of oppression recruit their victims as enforcers, how survival can slowly transform into complicity, how proximity to power can corrupt even those who were never meant to have any. But I also want to honour the full humanity of everyone involved - including the women Oum killed, who rarely appear in historical accounts except as body counts.

I don’t believe in the assertion that Moroccans won’t care about this story. There is no single Moroccan audience, just as there is no single way to approach history. Some may turn away, yes. Others may want the comfort of simpler stories. But I believe there is also a hunger for nuance, for stories that don’t resolve into romance or outright condemnation, but simply attempt to present reality as truthfully and authentically as possible. And I believe there will be actors who want to take on Oum, because the role demands rigour, depth, and courage.

My first film, Beneath a Mother's Feet, taught me that authenticity resonates across cultural boundaries. If this film is made with care and complexity, if it honours its subjects rather than exploiting them, then it will find its audience.

This isn't an easy project to pitch. There's no clear hero, no redemptive arc, no comfortable moral framework. It asks audiences to empathise with someone who did unforgivable things while understanding the system that created her. But that's exactly why I think it needs to exist. Stories like Oum's get buried all too often because they're too uncomfortable, too complicated, too morally ambiguous for easy consumption.

The challenge now is maintaining that complexity as the screenplay develops, resisting the industry pressure to simplify or sentimentalise. Oum's story demands to be told on its own terms - as a meditation on power, complicity, and survival under empire, as an honest confrontation with what colonialism did to the people caught in its machinery.

Labs and funders will want clarity. I will offer clarity. But I won’t grind away the contradictions that make this story necessary. Oum’s story has to be told on its own terms, as reckoning with the past.

The herbs in the basket still haunt me. They suggest someone trying to impose meaning on meaninglessness, to find ritual in brutality. Maybe that's what I'm doing too… trying to arrange these fragments of history into something that makes sense - the way Oum once packed herbs into a basket, searching for order in the midst of ruin.