Doc director Hakim Belabbes debuts Weight

Morocco-born, Chicago-based independent filmmaker and instructor Hakim Belabbes provides a requiem for one of Morocco's "unaccounted for" in his latest documentary, Weight of the Shadow, which has its world premiere in Dubai as part of the Muhr Arab feature competition. The film is about an elderly Moroccan couple who want to find out what happened to their son, who was kidnapped 37 years ago. Belabbes, who alternates between features and docus, is a DIFF regular. He nabbed best script and best cinematography kudos for his 2011 feature Boiling Dream, and Shadow is supported by DIFF's Enjaaz production support programme.
The middle son in a family of 11 children, Belabbes was born in Boujad, where his father owned the only movie theatre. He obtained a graduate degree in film and video production from Columbia College in Chicago. Many of his documentaries focus on his extended family, such as Boujad: A Nest in the Heat and Fragments. In fact, while he was working on Fragments, a journalist friend told him about the Itekkou family, whose lives were forever changed by the kidnapping of one of their sons in 1974, and whose story the film follows.
The Itekkou family are Amazigh, the native Moroccans once referred to as Berbers. They live in Boumalene, in southern Morocco, amid a remarkable landscape of
rose-coloured stone. When Belabbes visits in 2007, the nonagenarian patriarch Ali poignantly recounts the events surrounding his son H'mad's abduction. At the time, the teenager was attending a boarding school where he was a stellar pupil. However, he launched a protest because students from poor families were not given food, while the others received plenty. Classmates joined his protest. Soon after, in the middle of the night, H'mad was taken from the school by the feared State security services.
Weight is on at 7pm, Dec 15, at MOE.