Film Review: Deserts by Faouzi Bensaidi
Faouzi Bensaïdi strikes me as the kind of filmmaker who plants something lasting with each movie he makes. Not for immediate gratification or to impress
July 23, 2025
Faouzi Bensaïdi strikes me as the kind of filmmaker who plants something lasting with each movie he makes. Not for immediate gratification or to impress anyone, but because he understands that the best stories grow slowly, develop deep roots, and keep drawing you back long after you’ve left the theater.
Deserts embodies this approach perfectly. Critics who dismiss it as just another metaphor for emptiness or a simple nod to Westerns are missing the point entirely. This film is rich and layered every small gesture, every stretch of silence, every moment of bureaucratic madness reflects the reality of life in modern Morocco and speaks to something universal too.
But there’s something bigger happening here too, a sense of cosmic absurdity that brings to mind Cassavetes or Jarmusch, even some of the great stylized Westerns. This is a film that respects its viewers enough not to spell everything out or tie things up in a neat bow. It trusts you to sit with the questions it raises.
This is exactly what makes Faouzi’s films so powerful — they’re deeply rooted in Moroccan soil but somehow manage to speak to anyone, anywhere. Deserts could easily be set in any country where people go through the motions of daily life under systems that make no sense to them. The specifics might change, but that feeling of being caught in someone else’s maze? That’s universal. And yet the film never loses its Moroccan identity and you can feel it in every shot, every sound, every cultural detail.
I do want to address something, though — a small point that’s been on my mind. Some friends have told me they felt Faouzi “lost it” in the second half of the film. I get why they might feel that way. The story shifts gears, the pacing changes, everything becomes less straightforward and more slippery to grasp. But honestly, I see it completely differently. What they’re calling a loss of direction feels to me like Faouzi finding his truest voice. It’s like he’s stepping away from conventional storytelling and moving into something more personal — crafting not just a narrative but a whole mood, almost like a dream you’re having while awake. This is where you can really feel his hand in the editing room, shaping every moment with intention. Instead of just illustrating what happens next in the plot, he’s creating something closer to a vision.
This is where he does what he does best — building those layered, quietly beautiful moments that take real creative courage. Far from losing his way, I think this is where the film becomes most distinctly his. It’s cinema that’s allowed to breathe and move outside the usual rules, and for me, it’s some of his strongest work.
Bensaïdi takes those sun-baked landscapes and sparse settings and fills them with subtle moments of warmth, wit, and sadness. What looks like barren ground is actually teeming with life if you know how to look. In his vision, the desert isn’t empty at all, it’s full of hidden connections and the quiet persistence of human experience.
At first glance, Deserts looks like a straightforward buddy movie: two debt collectors, Mehdi and Hamid, driving across Morocco’s dusty landscape to chase down unpaid loans. But their car carries much more than paperwork, it’s loaded with all the frustration, boredom, and weird absurdity that comes with trying to make sense of modern life. And this being a Faouzi Bensaïdi film, you know there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface.
The desert itself becomes almost like a third character — this enormous, unchanging presence that seems to mirror the ridiculous situations these guys find themselves in. It’s not just scenery; it’s watching everything unfold with a kind of dry wit and quiet poetry that makes you feel both the humor and the melancholy of it all.
The film moves fluidly between different styles: it’s part road movie, part dark comedy, part sharp take on bureaucratic madness, but it always feels distinctly like Faouzi’s work. There’s something graceful about how he uses long, patient shots and carefully composed frames, letting silence do the heavy lifting instead of cramming everything into dialogue. He never forces his point; instead, he creates space for you to really look and feel your way through the uncomfortable, ironic moments.
Having known Faouzi for years and talked with him about his work, I can see his restless creative mind all over this film — that gift he has for taking ordinary situations and revealing their strange, almost mythical qualities. Deserts isn’t him trying something completely new; it’s more like he’s digging deeper into ideas he’s always been drawn to: how disconnected people can feel, how ridiculous our institutions can be, the contradictions of life in today’s Morocco.
Faouzi Bensaïdi strikes me as the kind of filmmaker who plants something lasting with each movie he makes. Not for immediate gratification or to impress
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