From acclaimed Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani comes a complex, affecting queer love story with a difference. Stock up on tissues, because The Blue Caftan is in New Zealand cinemas now.
Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri plays Halim, a perfectionist tailor who specialises in hand-embroidered women’s caftans, eschewing modern affectations like sewing machines to instead practice his age-old traditional technique. His wife, Mina (Lubna Azabal) runs their shop in medina of their Moroccan home town. They’ve been together for 25 years, and together keep a secret that could ruin their lives: Halim is gay, in a country where homosexuality is illegal.
However, they share a deep and abiding love for one another. But things are complicated when their new apprentice, the hunky, brooding Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) arrives on the scene, and Halim feels an attraction that goes beyond the semi-anonymous encounters he seeks at the local bathhouse. With their business struggling as customers balk at Halim’s perfectionism and slow work rate, they can’t afford any disruption to their arrangement, but the heart wants what the heart wants.
Gorgeously mounted and subtly told, The Blue Caftan is a perceptive and erotic portrait of a facet of love rarely explored on screen and set in a culture where the penalties for such transgression are brutal. At a time when LGBTQI rights are under attack around the world, its themes could not be more on point.
Writer and director Maryam Touzani has form for exploring the lives of marginalised people in Morocco; her first feature film, 2019’s Adam, looked at the relationship between a young, unwed pregnant woman and a baker who takes her in, at a time when simply being single and pregnant was against Moroccan law. Here she brings the same empathy and keen eye for telling detail to bear on a love story that may be unusual, but is nonetheless deep, resonant, and affecting.
