Life sometimes is a four-letter word. (More often than not.) The "enfant ensemble" in ALI ZAOUA couldn't be more perfectly cast (in view of the facts, in fact, better casting would be literally impossible). The nighttime musings of these kids as they drift off to sleep in the movie says it all: "When I'm dead, I'll be filthy rich." As mentioned elsewhere in these comments, I used to drive a cab. One night, I picked up a woman and three kids and took them from a very, very dangerous neighborhood to a slightly less lethal locale. The woman asked me to wait and left the kids in the cab with me as she ducked into a house. I waited (somewhat impatiently) and listened to the kids talking in the seat behind me. They spoke in awed whispers. "What does it look like?" "It's big- about this big." "What's it taste like?" "You'll see." I found myself grinding my teeth in anger. The woman emerged from the house and asked me if I could just wait a minute longer, that "he" was "on his way." I reluctantly agreed, but vowed that I would take my dispatcher to task for sending me on yet another drug run. The next thing I know, a pizza delivery driver pulls up. The woman rushes to him, pays him for two pizzas, and climbs back into the cab with them. I drive her back to her own neighborhood and ask her why she had the pizza delivered to another neighborhood. "Because the pizza guys won't deliver in our neighborhood." There are times, I swear, when it all gets to me. If you get a chance, see ALI ZAOUA and see what I mean.

When I hear some petulant tot in the Safeway market candy section whining because he can't have two candy bars, I want to plop the spoiled child in front of this film for about five minutes, which would be quite enough.

Director Ayouch mixes elements of children's stark gang life in modern day Casablanca with the hallucinatory dreams they have, and he creates a harsh and vivid tale built around three close pals who decide they must give their most recently murdered friend a decent burial--he was, after all their Prince, their leader, their compatriot. This may not sound like the stuff movie dreams are made of, and its not exactly a cheerer-upper, but the young actors are astoundingly real--and sometimes quite funny--and the willing viewer can be transported to another world within a world unlike anything you might find in Iowa

This is memorable film-making, examining a particular time and place-- in this case the Middle East--for it's universal elements; it isn't anywhere near the sweetness and light of The Sound of Music, but is perhaps a more honest immersion in human behavior.

Such lies my boy tells, thinks the prostitute, as Ali's mother watches her son fabricate a story about how she wanted to sell his eyes to a local television crew, who's there in the trenches of the Casablancan streets to film a documentary on runaways. But an impostor is among the glue-sniffers, thieves, and hanger-ons. Ali is their spokesperson, ironically enough, since the boy has his own room he can return to any time he likes, with a bed and clean sheets, a radio that plays cassettes, and a grateful parent who will tuck him in at night. When the female reporter asks where her mother is, Ali(Abdelhak Zhayra) stares into the camera and declares the whore dead.

Soon after the interview, Ali is struck down by an errant rock, this fatal throw, nothing but senseless payback for leaving a brethren of nihilistic street urchins(their rally cry, "Life is a pile of s***!"), led by an older mute boy who's like the Pied Piper of Sodomy. Left behind to contemplate the simple truth of Ali's sudden, untimely death, Omar(Mustapha Hansali), Boubker(Hitchama Moussone), and Kwita(Mournim Kbab) burden themselves with the responsibility of burying their crestfallen friend, while trying to stay above ground themselves on the streets of Morrocco.

Told in the film language of Italian neorealism, "Ali Zaoua" contains a number of fantasy sequences, in which Ali's dream to be a sailor is kept alive by Kwita, who adopts the seafaring journey to an island in the sky as his own. "Ali Zaoura" affixes brief animated interludes onto the urban landscape(i.e. a billboard with a woman's face) as a projection of Kwita's dream to sail away with a pretty schoolgirl he worships from afar. In one scene, he plays both sides of a conversation while she stands next to flowers reconstituted as a line drawing. By combining realism with fantasy, "Ali Zaoua" tell its gritty story of street life in amalgam. Magic neorealism is the guiding principle and testament to the indomitable spirit of a boy who staves off the hard facts about the bleak prospects that life has in store for him, by doggedly persisting that his dreams can be made corporeal. In a crucial scene that underscores the filmic poetics at work here, the boys encounter an improbable painting that depicts Ali's nautical voyage to an island, like hieroglyphics from the afterlife, inside a "cave" that had previously housed the boy's lifeless body, while they wait out the cops' raid of their makeshift shelter on the pier above them.

Kwita wants all of Morocco to remember his fallen friend, but Ali is far from being a heroic figure if you remove him from the context of the film's patriarchial ideology. Earlier in the film, when the boys are discovered spying on Ali's mother while she entertains her john, the prostitute expresses her dismay about her son's words on TV. Even though Ali was well-taken care of, he couldn't handle the shame of walking around his neighborhood with a whore. In keeping with Muslim tradition, it is verboten for women to initiate sex, even though the brand of Islam that's practiced in Morocco is considerably less strict than in other parts of the world. In another scene, Omar finally works up the courage to tell Ali Zaoua's mother(Amal Ayouch) that her son died, and returns her son's compass, a navigating gadget that is, metaphorically speaking, a moral compass. Now that she owns the device that served Ali so well, its arrow will point her in the right direction, too. The invitation to Ali's funeral that's extended to the prostitute is like a punishment for her sinful transgressions. It's her fault that Ali ran away. It's her fault that he's dead.

Although "Ali Zaoub" seems sanctimoniously calibrated against the prerogative of women to survive, there's no denying the film's ability to engage its audience in the lives of these lonely children.