The first words in Horses of God are spoken against a black screen. “Are you asleep?” Yechine asks his brother. “Tell me, what will Ghislaine think when she hears that I died a martyr?” he continues, asking about the unfulfilled love of his life, a girl living, like him, in the slums.
The imagined marvels of a paradise of perpetual delight are a temptation for young men dwelling in a squalid corner of hell. In Horses of God, director Nabil Ayouch imaginatively recreates the lives of one cell of bombers, tracing them from a childhood of kicking soccer balls across a dirt field through the moment before their “martyrdom” as they prepare to die—and murder. The film is inspired by the wave of suicide bombings that exploded across Casablanca in 2003, targeting Jewish sites and hotels and restaurants frequented by foreigners. Twelve bombers and 33 of their victims died; Morocco’s reputation as a friendly tourist destination was wounded.
Horses of God unfolds in a district tourists don’t care to see, the vast shantytowns ringing Casablanca with muddy alleys and rusty corrugated shacks. The central characters are brothers, Hamid and his younger sibling Yechine. Dead-end kids trying to survive, they fight for scraps in an environment of hopeless poverty, narcotics and corruption.
Sentenced to two years in prison, Hamid glows with a dull radiance when he returns. He was infected by an Islamic fundamentalism that supplies meaning and purpose in a world that seems to have little. The extremist sect also provides a tight sense of community, a gang with an apocalyptic sense of mission that seizes the imagination of young men with few prospects other than a paradise awaiting those who die for their faith. Stirring memories of Islam’s golden past, the cadre’s militant leaders paint a lurid picture of rampant Crusaders, Zionists and imperialists to explain the humiliation and degradation of the present. The Koranic tolerance for Christians and Jews is revoked; Muslims who don’t adhere to their agenda are apostates and deserve no consideration. “We love death as they love life,” their leader says.
With wonderful cinematic moments, Horses of God brings to life the formative surroundings of the foot soldiers for this dangerous creed. Their hopes have been dashed. They are looking for another world by destroying the only one they know.
Horses of God screens at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 30, and 9:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 2 at the Oriental Theatre. The screenings are part of Milwaukee Film Festival’s Worldviews Series sponsored by the Shepherd Express.
