Private Project

Dikra

Tafraoute, Morocco.
Mounir, a young dancer, has crossed the sea, fleeing the shifting winds of a France that’s closing in on itself.
There, the sun feels familiar, but the walls speak another language.
A conversation with Keltoum rekindles his doubts: how does one find a place to call home?
Between two shores, an intimate journey through invisible borders and the deep longing to belong.

  • Pierre-Loys Joubert
    Director
  • Mounir Amhiln
    Key Cast
  • Keltoum Taj
    Key Cast
  • Mohammed Laanani
    Key Cast
  • Oussama Rabhi
    Key Cast
  • Ayoub Alahyane
    Key Cast
  • Zakaria Chaib
    Key Cast
  • Jack Bartman
    Music
  • Cannelle Guhur
    Editor
  • Julien Lemaistre
    Foley Artist
  • Thomas Nuttin
    Foley Mixer
  • Geoffrey Kenner
    Vfx Supervisor
  • Florian Berger
    Sound Mixer
  • Youssef Berjamy
    Voice Over
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Dikra
  • Project Type:
    Feature, Short
  • Runtime:
    8 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    May 31, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    1,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    France, Morocco
  • Country of Filming:
    Morocco
  • Language:
    Arabic, French
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    1.33
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Cairo International Film Festival
    Cairo
    Egypt
    November 15, 2025
    World Premiere
    Official Selection
Director Biography - Pierre-Loys Joubert

Biography (EN)
My name is Pierre-Loys Joubert. I’m a cinematographer for film, trained on set, and I grew up in Marrakech, Morocco, where I’ve maintained deep connections.
After years of crafting images for other people’s stories films, music videos, commercials I felt the need to tell something more personal.
Dikra is my first fiction short as a director. Shot in Morocco, it’s a film about memory and sensation, born from an intimate bond with the places and the bodies that inhabit them.
I’m moved by what’s invisible that’s probably what I’m trying to film.

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Biographie (FR)
Je m'appelle Pierre-Loys Joubert. Je suis chef opérateur pour le cinéma, formé sur les plateaux, et j’ai grandi à Marrakech, au Maroc, où j’ai gardé des attaches profondes.
Après plusieurs années à mettre en image les projets des autres films, clips, publicité j’ai ressenti le besoin de raconter une histoire plus personnelle.
Dikra est mon premier court-métrage de fiction en tant que réalisateur. Tourné au Maroc, c’est un film de mémoire et de sensations, né d’un lien intime avec les lieux et les corps qui les habitent.
Je suis impressionné par l’invisible c’est sans doute ce que je cherche à filmer.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Dikra was born from an encounter with Mounir, and from a simple question I asked him one day: Where is home?
Mounir is French, of Moroccan origin. He grew up far from Morocco, carrying the image of a country transmitted through memory, stories, and imagination, but without ever fully inhabiting it. 
He understands darija, but he does not speak it. This distance from the language becomes a distance from himself. It embodies an intimate fracture, invisible yet deeply lived.
Through Dikra, I wanted to tell his story from his perspective, as closely as possible to his body and his silences. The film exists at the frontier between fiction and observation. It is not about explaining, but about capturing a state of being: a man suspended between two worlds, between inheritance and reality, between what he is and what he feels he has lost.
Dance becomes an essential language. Movement allows him to express what words cannot. The body carries a memory that language no longer holds. Mounir blends breakdance, rooted in the streets and his environment in France, with contemporary dance, more introspective and abstract, and gestures that echo his Moroccan origins. This hybridity is not a stylistic choice, but an intimate truth. His dance becomes the physical manifestation of a fragmented, plural identity.
The film also explores language as a place of vulnerability. There is a silent shame in not speaking the language of one’s parents. A constant feeling of displacement, of being slightly foreign everywhere.
The voice-over embodies this distant memory. It represents Morocco as an internal presence, a land that calls without ever fully revealing itself. It is neither a precise memory nor a tangible reality, but an emotional territory.
Dikra means “memory.” The film does not seek to resolve this identity conflict, but to inhabit it. It explores the fragile space in between, where one tries to reclaim what feels distant, and reconnect with a part of oneself that remains unknown.
Dikra is the portrait of a man in motion. A man searching, doubting, and through dance, attempting to reconcile with himself.