New York, NY, April 17, 2014 – Kino Lorber is proud to announce the New York theatrical opening of Horses of God, a film directed by Nabil Ayouch and presented by award-winning filmmaker Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), who first watched the film while in Marrakesh and has championed its release ever since.
Based on the eponymous best-selling novel by Mahi Binebine, Jonathan Demme Presents Horses of God will have its US theatrical premiere on Wednesday, May 14, at New York’s Film Forum. The film will expand nationwide after its New York premiere.
A drama set in a slum on the outskirts of Casablanca, and based on a horrific 2003 bombing (12 young men attacked multiple targets, leaving 45 dead), Horses of God is more a character study of children growing up without hope than it is a portrait of terrorists-in-training.
Yachine and Nabil, inseparable friends, fall under the influence of Yachine’s violent older brother, Hamid, after the latter is released from prison on drug charges, now a newly-minted Islamic fundamentalist.
These are street kids from poor families where everyday violence, mental illness, corruption, and dope-dealing compete with fantasies of escaping to Western Europe to earn scads of money or dreams of making it as a professional soccer player. They are subject to the lure of religious fanatics who blame their misfortune on “the imperialist Zionist conspiracy” and offer a “community of new brothers” to those who will submit to the discipline of martyrdom.
Nabil Ayouch’s deeply moving film has been lauded for its “brutal poetry” and the realism with which it depicts how insidiously and cynically fundamentalists ply their trade. The film was presented as part of Un Certain Regard at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
