Building a narrative through fragments and details

Some stories don’t arrive fully formed. They hover at the edges, just out of reach, waiting to be uncovered piece by piece. That’s how The Ogress of Fez has felt from the beginning: a slow unraveling of something hidden and half-remembered.

The women whose lives I’m trying to illuminate didn’t leave behind diaries or testimonies. Their voices, erased or silenced by design, persist only as footnotes in official documentation - medical records, arrest reports, colonial archives. What is left unsaid in these disparate records, the gaps and omissions, reveals as much as the words themselves.

Document reads: License for Moroccan Prostitutes in the Kingdom of Morocco (under French colonial rule)

This absence forces me to approach the narrative like an archaeologist, piecing together shards of a life. I’m struck by how colonialism operated not only in the realm of physical domination but also in the realm of storytelling: it dictated which stories were told and which were buried. Reclaiming these stories feels like an act of resistance, a way to challenge the narratives imposed by history.

But how do you give voice to the voiceless without ventriloquising  them? How do you construct a narrative that honours their humanity without appropriating their pain? These are questions I wrestle with daily. The philosopher Gayatri Spivak asks, “Can the subaltern speak?” Perhaps the question is not about giving them a voice but about creating a space where their silence can be heard, where their absence can resonate as presence.

Over the past months, I’ve surrounded myself with fragments of this world: colonial postcards, letters, novels, research papers, news articles. Each piece offers a glimpse, a texture, a small part of the larger picture. But gathering these fragments is only the first step. The real work is in finding what they mean together, in shaping them into something that lives and breathes on screen.

The challenge is in letting the images speak. Cinema thrives on suggestion, on what isn’t said outright. A glance, a moment of stillness, a silence can hold layers of meaning. Silence, in particular, has become central to how I imagine this film. Silence not as emptiness, but as a space for the audience to lean in, to feel the weight of what has been suppressed.

I’m inspired by filmmakers like Chantal Akerman, who captured the rhythms of women’s lives with such precision and restraint. Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman shows us how the mundane can carry the weight of the unspeakable, how the everyday can reveal what is hidden in plain sight. That approach feels particularly resonant here, where so much of the story lives in what was ignored or deliberately concealed.

For the first time, I feel like I’m beginning to see what this film could be. The fog is lifting. Its rhythm, its tone, its visual language are starting to take shape. I imagine the film moving like memory: nonlinear, fragmented, but deeply felt.

The Doha Film Institute screenwriting lab that I completed in December was instrumental in allowing me to turn a corner in this process. The deadlines helped, but more than that, it was the feedback and understanding from the mentors that made a difference. Raja Amari and Ghassan Salhab didn’t try to force the project into a predefined shape. Instead, they listened, encouraged, and gave me the space to find my way. That kind of support reminded me why I started this process in the first place.

I think about the words of the historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot: “Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation, the moment of fact assembly, the moment of fact retrieval, and the moment of retrospective significance.” In this film, I want to explore those silences, not to fill them, but to let them speak.

There is still so much work to do, but the story feels closer now. It’s no longer a distant idea. It’s beginning to feel alive.