Following the success of his first feature Mektoub, which broke records at the Moroccan box office (selling more than 350,000 tickets), filmmaker Nabil Ayouch returns with Ali Zaoua, a fable about three boys in Casablanca on a search to give their dead friend a proper burial. To shoot this film, Ayouch cast real homeless children, giving his fairy tale a believable chaotic energy that convinced the juries at festivals around the world: Grand Prix at Mannheim, Bronze Horse at Stockholm, Ecumenical Prize at Montreal, Grand Prix at Ouagadougou...

With Mektoub and Ali Zaoua, you break from reality and veer towards fairy tales. Was this intentional?

It's true that there is this in common between Mektoub and Ali Zaoua, they both depart from social problems that can't be ignored. In Mektoub, there was police corruption, cannabis growers, and the infamous sex scandal that shook public opinion. In Ali Zaoua, it's homeless children. And very quickly, with these realities, we enter the almost fantasy-like realm.

This fiction is exaggerated in Ali Zaoua, fed off of reality, which gives it this fairy tale aspect, like poetry. What inspired me was the three years that I spent in the streets before making the film, with children, with teachers from the Bayti Assocation, where I discovered this world that I did not know. You have a certain vision several thousand kilometers away, but our perception of Morocco is not the same. There, one has the feeling of existing between two worlds that pass but never collide, never meet. I became aware that the street had a poetical quality, a power that was almost lyrical and that the children's imaginations transposed them into a totally different reality.

I thought that Ali Zaoua was the symbol of this paradox. The kids were at once very raw and very violent and yet also filled with dreams that helped them to survive. They were at once very adult despite their youthful ages, yet very surprising in their analysis and their perceptions of life. At other times, they were completely children, but ones that never grow up, because they are capable of feeling awe toward things that even a child of two or three might have ignored. And that is very unstabilizing to be placed between two worlds, but very enriching from a director's point of view.

To enhance the dream elements, you added several animated sequences, for which you went to a well-known French animation studio, that of Jacques-Rémi Girerd, Folimage...

Almost immediately, we had the idea to insert animation into the real, but at the time, we didn't know how to do it. We presented the film to children -- as though it was a cinema workshop -- to develop a more playful side of the film. We also told them that the making of this film would be a step in their lives that could lead to new adventures,; however, for those that were die-hard street urchins, this movie wouldn't change anything in their lives.

So we began to introduce this aspect of distance - as we had also set out to do in the film - through workshops. Very quickly we realized that the children veered toward painting and design as a way of exorcising and unleashing certain inner demons that they had buried -- but that's what you'd expect, isn't it?

Then we contacted a company in Valence called Folimage that makes "auteur" animation films. I had been interested in their work long before I ever thought of making Ali Zaoua. We told them it would be great if they created animated characters drawing inspiration from the the drawings the children had made. I'd hoped this fusion would then seamlessly blend with the rest of the film. The animation sequences were done at the Folimage studios, except for one fresco. The designer, Sylvie Léonard from Folimage, came to Casablance for a weekend to do that one.

Robin Gatto