Abandoned by their parents, street kids Ali, Kwita, and Boukber become each other's surrogate family while roaming the streets of Casablanca begging for money. When Ali is ruthlessly murdered by a local gang, his friends are determined to give him a farewell suitable for royalty, and come... [More]

Abandoned by their parents, street kids Ali, Kwita, and Boukber become each other's surrogate family while roaming the streets of Casablanca begging for money. When Ali is ruthlessly murdered by a local gang, his friends are determined to give him a farewell suitable for royalty, and come together to plan his extravagant funeral. Director Nabil Ayouch brings this heart-wrenching battle between youthful innocence and harrowing experience to life with a spectacular, yet untrained cast of children. ALI ZAOUA depicts its subjects as children--who despite having been forced to grow up too soon--manage to retain their youthful imaginations. This creativity and naïve hopefulness is seen most clearly through several (animated) hallucination sequences. These sequences are in themselves paradoxical, as they are evidence of the children's spoiling (they are produced as the results of sniff glue), and their still-untarnished imaginations. [Less]