In Nabil Ayouch’s rousing, Arabic-language drama, two teenage boys begin singing about sex and fame, as their gleeful classmates, many of them wild-haired girls, leap around. “We want money”, chant the kids, who are all played by non-professionals from hard-scrabble suburb, Sidi Moumen. The young cast deserve to become filthy rich (the song Drahem is already on Spotify and I beg you to check it out; it’s even cuter than Turning Red’s boy-band-ballad pastiche, Nobody Like U). The film itself, though, is chasing a different kind of success.
The story’s set in an arts centre and the central character is rapper Anas (real-life Moroccan musician, Anas Basbousi aka Bawss), whose task is to introduce adolescents to “positive” hip-hop.
