Wolfmother, the upcoming feature by Moroccan filmmaker Ismaël El Iraki, has appeared in current African film-industry tracking as a Morocco-France project connected to the Venice Gap-Financing Market, giving new visibility to a film that places Arabic, French and Amazigh-language storytelling in the world of Tangier and the Rif.
African Film Press lists the project as a feature fiction film in financing, with Venice Gap-Financing Market 2026 among its industry supports during the Venice Production Bridge from September 4 to 6. The registry describes the film as centered on Amira Ouazzani, a cigarette smuggler and mother whose family is pulled into the orbit of cannabis trafficking and violence.
The project has been circulating through major development and financing platforms for several years. Atlas Ateliers, the industry program linked to the Marrakech International Film Festival, presents Wolfmother as a contemporary tragedy stretching from Tangier to the Rif mountains and Marbella. Its project page describes a Morocco-France-Spain-Belgium production structure, with Kasbah Films among the co-producers.
For Amazigh cultural coverage, the film’s Rif setting and language profile are especially notable. Atlas Ateliers’ materials describe El Iraki’s intention to draw on izran, the old Riffian poetic form, as a modernized chorus inside a thriller shaped by myth, family conflict and the political economy of cannabis. The Moroccan Cinematographic Center also listed Wolfmother among Moroccan projects presented to international professionals at Cannes in 2026, where it reportedly drew investor interest.
El Iraki’s first feature, Zanka Contact, premiered at Venice in 2020 and won an acting prize in the Orizzonti section. The renewed market presence of Wolfmother suggests the director is continuing to build a cinema language that links Moroccan genre filmmaking with North African cultural references, including Rif Amazigh oral forms rarely placed at the center of international film-financing conversations.
Sources
- African Film Press Pipeline Registry
- Atlas Ateliers: Wolfmother
- Moroccan Cinematographic Center: Morocco at Cannes 2026