‘Everybody Loves Touda’ Director Nabil Ayouch Talks New Film

French-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch is in Cannes for the third time with “Everybody Loves Touda,” launching out of competition.

The film tells the story of a young poet and singer steeped in an ancient Moroccan form of folk song called aita, but forced to perform trashy pop songs in bars filled with abusive men.

Below, Ayouch speaks with Variety about what “Touda” says about Morocco today.

Morocco’s Shaeirat poetesses and singers have already appeared in several of your films. That said, how did this project originate?

As you say, I’ve met several of these women during the shoots of my previous films and they were haunting me somehow. In talking to them about their lives, they told me how difficult it was for them to be so strong, so powerful, on stage, while at the same time being forced to live in a world where they feel so fragile because their art is not recognized the way it should be. They are forced to sing songs that they don’t want to sing because of the perception that male audiences have in a world of nightclubs, cabarets and bars, where rather than singers they are treated more like whores. This paradox interested me a lot. So I decided that I would make a film just about them.

How emblematic is “Everybody Loves Touda” of societal transformations underway in Morocco?

I see these women as agents of change, agents of resistance because of what happened in Moroccan society that made people develop a different perspective on them due to a type of [Islamic] conservatism that took hold during the 1980s and ’90s in the Arab world. While they [the Sheirat singers] used to be seen as heroines who were capable of carrying the voice and the art of a country, those people [the Talibans] decided that these women should be shut down; that their voice should be shut down. So I see them exactly on the cusp between two paths that a country like mine can take. And that’s why, for me, they have such an important part to play, not just in nightclubs or at weddings. They have an important part to play in our society.

Touda is played by Nisrin Erradi, who broke out with her supporting role in Maryam Touzani’s film “Adam.” She puts in a very strong performance. How did she prepare for this role?

Nisrin decided that she would prepare for this role way before the film. She was coached for a year and a half on how to sing like them, move like them, and talk like them. Because these singers have a particular way of speaking: they have their own vocabulary. Since the film’s principal photography lasted a long time and was done in non-consecutive shoots, she would have had the opportunity to go and make other movies in between. But Nisrin decided that she would stick to this character because that was the only way to be believable. She gave a lot of herself.

There is a tender and passionate sex scene in the film. Though it does not involve nudity, do you think it will run into trouble with Moroccan movie censors?

I am trying to protect myself from those issues because I think that the worst thing that could happen to me and all the directors in this region is self-censorship. Of course it’s happened before – whether it was “Much Love” or “A Minute of Sun Less” that I’ve been censored in Morocco, in part because of sex scenes. I think it’s a struggle against an invisible enemy that keeps, so you never know where the red lines are. And to be honest, I don’t want to know because then I would be afraid.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.