Interviews

Interview: Kamal Lazraq – Les meutes (Hounds)

Published on December 23, 2023

Seeping with film noir elements, but working with a naturalism and with a moody underworld thriller genre with a certain dose of spirituality and faith, Kamal Lazraq‘s feature debut is about the outcasts, about complex dynamics between father and son and where one bad choice begins a torrential rainfall of other missteps and miscues. One of the better screenplays out of this year’s Cannes (Les meutes aka Hounds was selected for the Un Certain Regard section and won the Jury’s Prize), and part of a new wave of Moroccan filmmaker generation truly testing the waters with original works, I got to sit down with the filmmaker at the 2023 Marrakech International Film Festival and spoke about street casting (Ayoub Elaid and Abdellatif Masstouri are incredible finds), the importance of figs, and what he is looking toward for his next feature film.

Eric Lavallée

Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).