In Animalia, a pregnant woman, Itto (Oumaïma Barid), is fleeing what appears to be an alien invasion. There aren’t any green Martians or flying spaceships. Instead, a cluster of thunderstorm clouds forms ominous, green-tinged shapes that encroach on a rocky road in rural Morocco. Staring at the environmental phenomenon, Imma briefly enters a parallel dimension that’s like if Terrence Malick directed The Matrix: Itto’s spirit separates from her body amidst discordant orchestral wailing; teardrops multiply into floating, human-shaped blobs that form a constellation.

Returning to Earth – or perhaps just waking up from a panic attack – Itto asks a young man if he witnessed the same shapes in the sky. He explains, “Like fish who don’t see the water they’re in, we’re immersed in something we don’t see either.” Within the narrative, neither religion nor technology can explain whether extraterrestrials visited the planet, or if the weather just happened to be rather extreme that day. Animalia, an arthouse sci-fi, doesn’t want to offer an explanation – in fact, it does the opposite.

“We’re facing a challenging period,” says Sofia Alaoui, the writer and director of Animalia, on a Zoom call from Rabat. “With AI, technology, and our disconnection from nature, we have to question how we’re living in this world.” We’re also fish who don’t recognise that we’re swimming in water? “Yes, the film challenges our vision of life. Because we’re arrogant, we think we know how life works. I want to challenge that.”

Alaoui, a 35-year-old Moroccan filmmaker, made her industry breakthrough in 2020 with a César Award-winning short, So What If the Goats Die, which she expanded into Animalia. (Her intended English-language title, Among Us, was blocked by the video game of the same name.) Before any sci-fi shenanigans unfold, Itto already has her own covert operation: she’s living in a mansion with her affluent husband, Amine (Mehdi Dehbi), whose judgmental family despise the fact that he married someone from a Berber background.

Switching between French, Arabic, and Berber, Itto is a code-switching chameleon who discovers an alien invasion is an excuse to restart her life. She hitchhikes with a Berber stranger, Fouad (Fouad Oughaou), and tries to reckon with the misogyny and classism she’s received all her life. It starts with speaking her favoured language, Berber.

“Berbers were in Morocco before Muslims,” Alaoui explains. “Berbers have their own mythology, their own language. For a very long time, even in Morocco, the Berber language was forbidden, because they had to speak Arabic. Sometimes I don’t want to use the word ‘Berber’, because the real name is ‘Amazigh’, which means ‘free people’. My origins are Amazigh. People from the mountains are usually Amazigh. When I grew up, there was [prejudice towards] Amazigh people. The social clash was really strong. There’s still a thing where it’s like, ‘You’re from the mountains. You’re poor. We can’t talk to you.’ In this movie, I wanted to recreate the reality of how society works between classes.”

Can you really be religious if you’re a misogynist and arrogant about your social class? Nowadays, in Morocco, there’s a lot of demonstrating what it is to be Muslim, but I’m not sure at the heart there’s that consciousness and spirituality

Outside of the leads, the cast comprises non-professional actors who ground the sci-fi and add a quasi-documentary aesthetic. Alaoui didn’t arrange rehearsals; they didn’t even see the script in advance. “It was much more coming to set, and discovering what you’re going to do.” For the crew, the director asked them to watch films like Arrival, Under the Skin, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. “Sacred Deer is about a weirdness you cannot understand, but you accept it.”

In Animalia, the equivalent weirdness starts with creatures – primarily dogs, birds, and sheep – behaving out of step, often lining up to stare at Itto like they’re possessed. In a way, humans and their animal counterparts are bonded in the face of an inexplicable sci-fi incident. Two-thirds into the film, the kinship enters new territory. “When I thought about Ito hugging the sheep, I was really excited,” says Alaoui. “It’s not just a sheep – it’s her mother. It’s recreating something so emotionally strong that we feel as if she’s travelling to another dimension, where her mother is now a sheep.”

In the third act, after Alaoui’s transcendent visions, society tries to return to normal. At a mosque, Muslim prayers are interrupted by unusual behaviour by birds and ants. “It’s not a film against religion,” Alaoui says. “It’s a film that questions what it means to be spiritual.” In terms of the film tackling sexism, faith and classicism, the director explains, “It’s the reality of being a woman in Morocco. It’s the environment. At the beginning, the family is really religious. But can you really be religious if you’re a misogynist and arrogant about your social class? Nowadays, in Morocco, there’s a lot of demonstrating what it is to be Muslim, but I’m not sure at the heart there’s that consciousness and spirituality.”

Animalia (Film Still)Wrong films

At Sundance, Animalia won a jury award for “Creative Vision”, and Alaoui is now juggling multiple projects: one is Tarfaya, a Moroccan mystery movie about a sleeping sickness, while she’s also busy on an English-language sci-fi. The latter is because, she explains, genre cinema is tricky to finance in Morocco. “We’re still stuck in the Western way of seeing Arab stories. Sometimes French institutions will finance an Arab movie, and they want it to deal with a woman being harassed, or an emancipation story where the woman says ‘fuck’ to her Muslim society. I’m really not happy with that. I’m resisting doing the same stories.”

So Animalia is leading the way for more Arab sci-fi movies? “It’s complicated. Maybe in a few years it’ll change. My generation is pushing the limits so that we can have the space to create our own stories. But it’s hard.”

Animalia* is out in UK cinemas on December 12*