by Helen Barlow
Moroccan director Maryam Touzani, 45, and her French-Moroccan husband, producer Nabil Ayouch, 56, are quite the filmmaking couple. The queen and king of Moroccan cinema, we might say. Their award-winning, groundbreaking films are regularly the Moroccan entry for the Oscars, and while only 2022’s The Blue Caftan was short-listed, 2019’s Adam came close.
Their latest comedy drama, Calle Malaga, which they co-wrote, is a crowd-pleasing gem, in part because of the astounding performance of Carmen Maura, best known as Almodovar’s early muse and the star of his first hit, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Though her widowed Maria Angeles character, 79, is far from having a breakdown here. She in fact comes out fighting when her cash-strapped daughter Clara (Marta Etura) returns from Madrid attempting to sell her beloved Tangier home on the lively market street, Calle Malaga. In the process, Maria Angeles manages to fall in love, with her antiques dealer Absalom (Ahmed Boulane) and in sensitively handled love scenes Maura even performs nude.
Casablanca-based Touzani and Ayouch speak French together and have strong French backing in making their films. Both also speak fluent English, Spanish and Arabic. Touzani, the daughter of a Spanish mother, was born and raised in Tangier, speaking Spanish with her mother and grandmother. After obtaining a master’s degree in journalism at age 23 in London, she moved back to Morocco and directed short documentary films. Her debut was Sous Ma Peau Vieille, which discussed prostitution in Morocco, and she turned it into the 2015 French-Moroccan feature, Much Loved, directed by Ayouch. The film caused a stir in Morocco due to its unsimulated sex scenes and was ultimately banned there.
In 2017, Touzani and Ayouch co-wrote Razzia, directed by Ayouch and set in Casablanca and the Atlas Mountains where Touzani also played the lead. Touzani then directed her first feature film, Adam, about a young unwed pregnant woman and inspired by a similar situation Touzani experienced where her parents sheltered a heavily pregnant woman in Tangier. She co-wrote Ayouch’s 2021 film Casablanca Beats about Moroccan youths expressing themselves through hip-hop culture and now directs Calle Malaga, which she wrote with Ayouch.
The son of a Moroccan father and French mother, Ayouch grew up in France while spending his summers in Casablanca.
You are a couple in real life. How does that operate, working on each other’s projects?
Nabil Ayouch: “We’ve been doing that for 10 years now. It’s rare, it’s precious. Maryam co-writes all my movies as I do with her movies and I produce them. She looks at all my work from the preparation till the post-production. We’re a natural duo. Even when she acted in one of my previous movies, Razzia, she was not aiming to be the character, but she became that during the writing. It’s organic.”
So what is Calle Malaga about?
Maryam Touzani: “It’s about a 79-year-old Spanish woman born in Tangier whose daughter arrives one day and decides to sell the house she’s always lived in. It’s about how this woman struggles to keep her house, to keep her belongings, the souvenirs of her whole life and how she’s going to hold on to her past, and in doing so, becomes even more alive somehow.”
Where did the idea come from?
MT: “It’s not really an idea. It’s more an emotion. It’s a film that was born out of grief, out of loss. I was extremely close to my mother who passed away a few years ago. Unconsciously, I just needed to keep talking to my mother. I used to speak to her in Spanish, because I’m also Spanish. My grandmother was Spanish, and I grew up speaking Spanish, and I just really needed to go back to my memories of my mother somehow, to keep her alive, to keep feeling like I was spending time with her. So, developing the character of Maria Angeles brought back so many memories, also of my grandmother, who came from Andalucia to Tangier when she was very young. Everything got mixed up, and it took me back to my hometown of Tangier. It’s the first film I shot in the city where my mother grew up and it was my first time filming in Spanish, because I needed to keep hearing this language.”
The apartment where Maria Angeles lives is incredible. How did you find it, and what kind of atmosphere were you looking for when you shot the film?
NA: “We could have shot in a studio, but Maryam didn’t want to, because half of the film is inside the apartment. She wanted to have an apartment in the middle of a place that is lively, so you can feel the sounds of the street around us. Where this apartment is located is also important, as it’s in the Spanish neighbourhood, in a street that goes inside the medina and up to the Kasbah, so we were in the heart of the old Tangier. The apartment, which is owned by an old American lady, keeps the natural spirit of the place, because those buildings are Spanish buildings.”
MT: “I always need to shoot in natural settings. I need to feel that there’s something authentic about it, and in this apartment particularly, I needed to feel even more what the walls had to say. I really needed to feel the history of this place, because for Maria Angeles these walls represent so much. They’re like witnesses of her life. So, I really needed to feel this in the apartment. It’s a character in the story. It’s almost alive. The objects are almost alive. It’s what she’s seen for the last 40 or 50 years.
“And then, I really wanted to feel the energy of the street, the people, the smells, the noise. Of course, it’s always a bit challenging to shoot in natural settings, especially when they’re so lively. But I think it makes the situation even more authentic.”
Maria Angeles loves living there.
MT: “It’s her little paradise. You know, she doesn’t need more. She needs to go down to speak to the grocers and she’s got her friends in the neighbourhood. She sees people that she’s been seeing for so many years. The sun shines and her life is in her heart. She enjoys her life.”
We once spoke to Carmen Maura for The Women on the 6th Floor, a 2010 film she made in Pigalle, Paris and she said how she likes to explore the worlds she inhabits in movies.
NA: “Yes, she came to Tangier a few weeks before to experience the city and to live in the streets very close to the apartment where we shot. She wanted to feel the beating heart of the city, which is only 14 kilometres from Spain.”
The film explores aging and sexuality in old age.
MT: “We have to be able to age freely and not age according to other people’s expectations. For me, it was essential to explore this through the character of Maria Angeles who frees herself. She’s always been a free woman, but she becomes even more conscious of that as she’s about to lose all the things that she’s had in her life. She becomes conscious of her body, also more of her sexuality. She rediscovers pleasure. She talks openly about it. And I think that’s something very important, because as we age, sexuality becomes something that’s frowned upon, where you feel that you’re desexualized. I think that’s terribly unfair and I’ve always been very sensitive to that. Maria Angeles breaks all barriers, the taboos around sexuality in old age. She says, ‘I’m going to enjoy my body, and I’m going to enjoy being with this man’. It was also important to show aging bodies, because we have the tendency a lot in cinema, to hide the aging bodies as we hide death, unless it’s violent death in action films and stuff. But real death we hide.
“I think there is this kind of fear about death and aging, that we always try to suffocate. I wanted to be able to, on the contrary, to explore aging in a beautiful way, to show that aging can be something beautiful. Because I really believe it is, and I believe it is a privilege to grow old and to be able to celebrate these aging bodies and celebrate this moment in life.”
And Carmen Maura was up for anything?
MT: “In the beginning, Carmen was quite afraid of going naked, because she had never done that in any of her films, and she’s had a long career. Very interesting.”
NA: “We went to Madrid to see her, and she loved the script, and she was ready to go for it, but she asked us the question, ‘Do I really have to be naked?’ And we told her, ‘Yes’. ‘I mean, really, for real?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never done that and I’m 79’. We told her that she could decide, of course, but that for us, if she didn’t reach that point, what Maryam wanted to express in the film would not be expressed. So, she had to do it. And she said, ‘Ok’.”
MT: “It’s about the freedom and the strength that comes with aging, where you say, ‘I don’t care’. I mean, she strips off her clothes, but it’s not only about her clothes, it’s about her soul. It’s about letting herself be seen within, in the beauty of old age, and saying, ‘This is who I am’ and affirming that. We spoke a lot, and Carmen understood the reasons why I wanted her to take off her clothes. And it was not just something banal. It wasn’t just because I wanted to show her naked. It was because there was something that she was really defending by the fact of taking off her clothes, by showing her aging body with its wrinkles, with everything that I find beautiful, and saying, ‘This is beautiful, look at it. I want people to look at me’. So, that is something that she felt, and that’s what I really loved about it. In the end, it was empowering for her, the fact of saying, ‘I’m going bare’. It was a beautiful feeling to do that together.”
Calle Malaga releases in cinemas on 23 April 2026
