Synopsis
Horses of God (Les Chevaux de Dieu, 2013) is Nabil Ayouch's Moroccan-French drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Ten-year-old Yassine and his older brother Hamid grow up in Sidi Moumen, a vast shantytown on the edge of Casablanca where there's little beyond dust, football and fistfights.
Ayouch tracks the boys across roughly a decade. Their father has sunk into depression, their mother holds the household together, one brother joins the army, another is ill — and the neighborhood tough Hamid will let no one touch Yassine. Then prison rewires Hamid. He comes out quiet and devout, under the wing of a preacher named Abu Zubeir, and pulls Yassine and his friends into a "brotherhood." What looks like an escape from poverty and drugs tightens, slowly, into a trap.
It draws on a real wound — the May 2003 suicide attacks in Casablanca — and on Mahi Binebine's novel "The Stars of Sidi Moumen." A Cannes selection that travelled the festival circuit, it's for viewers ready for a hard, un-preachy look at how an ordinary kid is turned into a bomber. Stream Horses of God online on iFILM.
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