Mohamed Mouftakir was born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1965. His short films, La Danse du Fetus (2005) and Fin du Mois (2007), both received the Grand Jury Prize at the Tangiers National Film Festival. Pegasus, his first feature-length film, won the prestigious Golden Stallion award at the 2011 FESPACO film festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Inspired by the cinematography of David Lynch, as Mouftakir has suggested in numerous interviews, his films are both typical and atypical for Moroccan cinema, particularly films made in-country in the last fifteen years. Mouftakir’s flawless camera work, shot in Red One (High Definition), captures the southern Moroccan rural life, where Berber traditions are still strong despite the country’s emerging global economic status. At least in terms of the film’s décor and visual appearance, Mouftakir gives international audiences what they would expect when they try to picture Morocco. The atypical aspect of the film is its plot, which dwells on the psychological instability and physical abuse of women in rural areas.

The story focuses on two women, Zineb and Rihana. Zineb is a mentally and emotionally unstable psychiatrist working for a man, somberly dressed in black, who walks with a limp. He seems to be the head doctor whose only aide in the asylum, besides Zineb, is a nurse (whose headdress resembles a nun’s), also dressed in black. All three spend their time in the prison-asylum with one young female prisoner/patient named Rihana. The young girl, found mysteriously abandoned in the streets, is traumatized and pregnant, claiming to have been impregnated by “The Lord of the Horse.” During multiple flashbacks, audiences are taken back to Rihana’s childhood, where she is brutally abused by a tyrannical father, who is a skilled horseman and also the head of the tribe. Because there is no male heir, the father raises Rihana as a boy so that she may continue the tradition of breeding and racing horses, thereby maintaining the power and prestige of the tribe. The tribe lives under the tale of the powerful “Lord of the Horse,” a mythical warrior who remained single all his life, had no heirs, and was only powerful as long as he ruled all horses and men.

Despite being sequestered as a child, Rihana finds love in the mosque. Zayd, a young scholar, discovers her true identity and teaches her to read and write, and the power of knowledge leads her to explore her true identity as a woman. Her father finds out about her meetings with Zayd and rapes her, and she runs away. When she is brought to the asylum, she has suppressed all memories of the rape, claiming instead that Zayd (to whom she has imagined making love) is the father of her baby. Rihana’s story, slowly told to Zineb, becomes a tale of Freudian transference and countertransference as the psychiatrist becomes the patient, delving into her own haunted past. Both women were abused, escaped the overbearing patriarchy of rural life, and are now seeking to find their true identities as free women. However, this freedom is not really achieved, since they are both enclosed by the physical prison/asylum and their troubled minds. The message—that these women have been repressed by male domination through hyper-patriarchal structures and traditional belief systems—is not lost on audiences.

Although stunningly filmed, the shifting back and forth between reality and dream, psychotic episodes, and Kafkaesque dialogue makes this a tedious film. It seems to want to situate itself somewhere between the Western, psychological-analytical method and the mythical Maghrebi/Arab tales of yore. At one point Zineb remarks to the dark doctor who has told her she must be Rihana’s psychiatrist: “Rihana lives in the delusions they created.... She’s suffered her whole life…. We’ve all read Freud, Jung, Adler, Lacan and others, but have we really understood our patients, are we able to see things from their perspective? Who knows?” This scene is followed by Zineb’s own imaginings, during which she returns to Rihana’s village (which might be her own, though this is unclear) and meets Zayd’s ghost, who has “come back from war.” “What war?” she asks, as she gazes out the window overlooking the deserted village, depopulated of children and men. The only inhabitants left, besides the ghost of Zayd, are women dressed in black who state that they must “kill a horse for meat” because they are starving. We are never told why the village has been decimated, what war befell the region, and what happened to all the horses. Despite stunning camera work, the film tries to do too much in the way of storyline(s). There are interesting gender-bending moments, as when Rihana’s father tells her that “one isn’t born a man, one becomes one,” and a plausible subtext about women’s agency in society as being determined by whether or not they have access to knowledge. Writing and defining oneself through the written word is a predominant leitmotif. Rihana, once she learns how to write, writes her name on her body and on the walls of her various physical prisons (the walls of her father’s house and the prison/asylum). As emphasized by the filmmaker, the only reason she has access to the mosque and, therefore, knowledge and writing, is that she is dressed like a boy.

The film also alludes to a sacred story through its title, Al-Burāq. The Arabic title evokes the name of the famous white horse that the Prophet Mohammed rode to Jerusalem, stopping first in the “7th Heaven,” where he met other notable prophets (Abraham, Jesus, Moses) before arriving finally in Mecca. This journey, described in the Qu’ran, is known as the Isra and Mi’raj, the two parts of the Prophet’s Night Journey. The richness of this ancient tale, evoked in the title in Arabic, is unfortunately lost in the film, unless we think of the two women as also on journeys to seek true knowledge. One supposes that Mouftakir chose the title Pegasus (Pégas in French, the second language on the marquee) in order to achieve the mythical Western equivalent to Al-Burāq. Arabic-speaking audiences will also know the story of the “winged horse” (Al-Bighassus), which is synonymous for Pegasus. Yet in all these tales, myths, and sacred stories, the horse is white with wings, whereas in Mouftakir’s film it is black, unable to fly, and more often than not, confined to the cell of its stable. The horse’s color is perhaps also symbolic, meant to evoke the darkness of the unexplained violent behavior of patriarchal societies that makes women go mad.