Paris (AFP)

With "Adam", her first film as a director, in theaters on Wednesday in France, the Moroccan actress Maryam Touzani looks at the torment of single mothers in a society that considers them outcasts.

In this film, presented in the parallel section Un certain regard at the last Cannes Festival, Maryam Touzani recounts the meeting between Samia (Nisrin Erradi), a young woman pregnant with a relationship out of wedlock, and Abla (Lubna Azabal), mother of an eight-year-old girl who sells pastries in Casablanca. Initially foreign, even hostile to each other, they will be brought to understand and evolve.

Maryam Touzani's film tackles the subject of sexual relations outside marriage, punished by law in Morocco. At the material time, if a single woman gave birth in hospital she was immediately delivered to the police, told AFP in Cannes in May Maryam Touzani, who remembers the day when a young pregnant woman knocked on the door of his parents in Tangier to ask for work.

"My mother decided to welcome her for a few days until we found a solution. But there was none," she said. The young woman offered her services as a cleaning lady and hairdresser, but as soon as people noticed that she was pregnant, they asked her to leave.

"So she stayed with us until delivery," explains Maryam Touzani who explores with this first film the dilemma of these destitute mothers, forced to abandon their child.

"She wanted to abandon her baby from birth in order to give her a chance to have a decent life and start her own again and then become a respectable woman again," recounts the filmmaker, who notably directed several documentaries and short fiction films before , and worked on the scripts for "Much Loved" and "Razzia" by filmmaker Nabil Ayouch, her husband.

"When the baby arrived, things were no longer as simple as she had given birth over a holiday weekend and she had to keep it until the adoption service opened. I was with her while "She was trying to suppress her maternal instinct," added the director, who was a student at the time. "It was painful to see that, it shocked me a lot."

"Little by little, I saw the shell breaking and its suffering growing, the deadline for adoption arriving. The maternal instinct awoke in spite of itself," recalls Maryam Touzani, who had the idea to tell this story while she was pregnant. "I understood how terrible it must have been to pretend."

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