Animalia: French-Moroccan director Sofia Alaoui's cosmic exploration of faith, class, and the supernatural

From the dawn of the cosmos, humanity has wrestled with the nature and purpose of sentient life. French-Moroccan director and screenwriter, Sofia Alaoui, confronts these profound questions head-on in her allegorical feature debut, Animalia, a film that challenges viewers to reconsider their perspective on the world.

Born in Casablanca to a Moroccan Muslim father and a French Christian mother, Sofia's upbringing spanned continents — from Morocco to China — before she pursued cinema studies in Paris.

Her global experiences, combined with a lifelong passion for film, inspired her to establish her own production company, Jiango Films, in 2017.

Sofia's work has already earned critical acclaim: she won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival twice — first for her short film So What If The Goats Die in 2021, and again for Animalia in 2023, where the feature premiered to worldwide attention, before making its UK theatrical debut on 12 December 2025.

The film follows a young Amazigh woman, Itto, played by Oumaïma Barid, who is raised in humble circumstances and then marries into a wealthy family, where her mother-in-law disapproves of her social class.

When Itto is separated from her husband, and Morocco is thrown into a state of panic by an extraterrestrial invasion, Itto, pregnant, embarks on a path of self-discovery. 

In Animalia, characters are not just forced to challenge their views on class, religion, and the patriarchy but also to confront their place in an evolving supernatural world through animals, in an enthralling watch. 

Sofia shares that her religious and mythological curiosity was sparked at an early age by exposure to a mix of cultures, which inspired the incorporation of spiritual references into the film.

"I've always questioned my faith, which gave me a chance to get to know myself better," Sofia shares with The New Arab

"Returning to Morocco after my studies, a Muslim country, albeit a dogmatic one, I wondered if you can be religious in a capitalist world driven by materialism and selfishness? So I created an event to shake society. In Animalia, I wanted to disturb this rich family's way of thinking and make them reconsider their relationship to faith."

This internal dialogue of faith in her personal life caused a "crisis" for the Parisian graduate, yet it allowed her growth.

"It's an opportunity to learn. If you practice religion without questioning it, you don't truly know it; you're just doing it out of habit."

Sofia adds, "Some Western media couldn't comprehend why the film was not more critical of Islam, and I had to reiterate this is about a spiritual journey."

Between reality and myth

A defining element of Animalia lies in its use of animals — and with it came a set of challenges no screenplay can fully anticipate. Sofia admits she approached them as she would human performers.

"I wrote their parts like they were actors," she says, "and at the beginning I was stressed because it was nothing like how it was in the screenplay."

The unpredictability was constant. "There was a scene with a sheep who wouldn't go to Barid, and the one time it did, she grabbed it so hard so it wouldn't move," Sofia recalls.

Logistics only compounded the difficulty: "The birds were blocked at the border, so we had to shoot them in a studio in Paris and use VFX. The window you see the bird knocking on is done in France."

Beyond the animals, the director found herself confronting the gap between what is written and what ultimately unfolds on set.

Reflecting further, Sofia describes being "unaware" of how much can shift between script and screen. "There were many parts that could've been stupid or ridiculous," she explains, "so the roads to make it poetic and create emotion were complicated. To find the right tone visually, you have to stay concentrated."

Beyond the gaze

Delving more deeply into the artistic sensibility that shapes her work, Sofia traces her relationship with the unknown and the metaphysical back to her upbringing. "Growing up in (east) Asia, the relation to the unknown and supernatural is anchored in reality, as it is in Morocco," she tells The New Arab. 

"But for me to express the melancholy and poetry I felt, I gravitated towards Asian rather than Arab cinema."

Her understanding of Moroccan film history also shapes that instinct. Reflecting on her contribution to Moroccan Cinema Uncut, Sofia explains that "it covers how the Western gaze shaped the history of Moroccan and Arab cinema." 

In Morocco, she notes, "the first and at the time only directors authorised to make films were French." Her response was to move in a different direction altogether: "I wanted something that felt closer to poetry, to really question the social issues of Morocco on a metaphysical level."

Yet that choice has not been without friction. Filmmakers from the global south — particularly those from ethnic minority backgrounds — are often met with accusations of tailoring their work to Western sensibilities, a critique that frequently comes from within their own communities.

The imbalance is striking. Such scrutiny is rarely applied in reverse, where Western filmmakers freely draw from 'eastern' cinema without facing the same questions of intent or authenticity. Quentin Tarantino has openly acknowledged the Hong Kong action film City on Fire (1987) as a key inspiration for Reservoir Dogs (1992), while Wes Anderson has repeatedly cited the work of Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray as a formative influence on his own visual language.

Responding to these thoughts, Sofia makes it abundantly clear that she is "sincere" and not succumbing to any demands. "Whichever gaze or lens you view films through, my job as a storyteller is to work on these characters that you feel a type of attachment to," she says. 

To much jubilation, the Casablancan reveals that Animalia was, in fact, well received in Morocco. "I've shown it all over the country, from conservative areas to non-conservative areas, and everyone can appreciate the honesty the film possesses," she tells The New Arab.  

When finally quizzed about how she would deal with the event of an actual extraterrestrial invasion, the director says, "I know they exist, I just hope they will be nice with us."

The film ultimately reads as a dedication to an unknown lifeform. And if that encounter were ever to come, Sofia already knows what she would say: "I will say, oh dear friend, I was waiting for you."

Tariq Manshi is a London-based freelance journalist. Previously, he served as the Middle East & North Africa correspondent for Bath Time Magazine and contributed as a football writer at From The Spot

Follow him on Instagram: @tarmansh