The Moroccan favorite dish, Rziza, consists of noodles that are shaped into a turban and then baked. A machine can do it too, but it only works really well by hand, because you have to have a feel for the dough. Samia has this feeling. She learned how to make rziza from her grandmother. And then you don't forget something like that, not even in a serious emergency in which Samia is. She goes door to door in Casablanca and asks about work. Cut hair, help with housekeeping, she would do anything. In addition to all of this, she also needs quarters. Because she is clearly heavily pregnant, she came to the big city because she cannot hope for help at home in her village. After all, she has a "child of sin" in her womb.

The film "Adam" by Maryam Touzani tells of Samia finally finding shelter.

Abla also sent her away first, but then took another look at the street late in the evening and finally allowed her to enter.

A gesture of solidarity between two women, a gesture that is also marked by mistrust, because Abla opens the door, but she remains locked.

She has her own story, which is inscribed on her angular face, a story that she would love to lock up in her quiet life with her little daughter.

But Abla's life has a window to the world.

Because she is a baker, and when she opens her shop in the morning, which is actually little more than a hatch, then she takes part in life.

The reluctance can be clearly seen in her.

"A room of your own" or "A room to yourself" - that is, with the famous title of Virginia Woolf ("A Room of One's Own"), in a concrete and figurative sense a central concern of the women's movements.

It makes sense to think of this motif with "Adam" and to transfer it to the conditions of Moroccan society.

Because your own space could very well be a shared space in a world in which the family is strictly based on male dominance.

Samia and Abla share an apartment with little Warda, a safe place that has to be protected from gossip.

Skillful revelation of the background

Otherwise only Slimani, a friendly man who brings the flour and courted the Abla, is allowed in. The flour comes from the factory, it is probably stretched, as Samia immediately notices. She knows how to bake, and when she did Rziza one morning without being asked, Abla's shop has a new attraction.

The short-term hostel has already become something of a community, inspired by little Warda, who was immediately curious about Samia.

But it then takes time before the hardening that the life of unmarried women in Morocco brings with it can be broken.

It also takes a certain amount of time because “Adam” has a perfect command of the dramaturgies of international art house cinema.

With each new scene, Maryam Touzani pulls the curtain a little further to the side, behind which she has hidden the prehistory of her characters.

With each new scene, the two leading actresses Lubna Azabal and Nisrin Erradi also become more beautiful, they also open a window onto themselves, as it were.

We don't bake according to a recipe here

After all, it is a cassette that Samia plays against Abla's will that breaks the spell.

"Batwanes Beek" by the Algerian singer Warda is the name of the song that Abla thinks she can no longer bear because she associates a great loss with it.

The two women are literally struggling to see whether music can come back into their lives, the scene is at the same time half a dance.

For a moment it seems that between Samia and Abla more could be possible than just friendship and solidarity.

But that's enough.

Maryam Touzani is not interested in telling a lesbian love story.

She just wants to measure the space that women can have in common.

How do you define home?

That is also true in their own case. Maryam Touzani is married to the Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch, she wrote the script for “Much Loved” (2015) together with him and also played a leading role in the 2017 film “Razzia”. Together, the couple took up such controversial issues as prostitution or the difficult relationship between the predominant Arab and Berber cultures. Now Maryam Touzani is directing herself, based on her own script. "Adam" is clearly aimed at international markets and in 2020 was also nominated for a foreign Oscar for Morocco. The attractions of the local cuisine, but also of the Maghreb music, are typical factors with which a director like Maryam Touzani can succeed.

But that would all be baking according to a recipe, if it weren't for a feeling for the “dough” of this story, which is clearly centered on an idea of ​​femininity and motherliness. “Stay in the nest” says one of the songs that Samia has in mind. Whether there is a nest for children, and ultimately also for their mothers, whether one lets them build one, unaffected by the patriarchal family ideals all around, this is the question that “Adam” boils down to. “Very little really belongs to us,” says Samia at one point.

Since she is still under the impression of her search for a hostel, on which she met a lot of non-binding courtesy.

“May God remove the thorns on your way.” That is well meant, but there is no help from above, only from one another.

"Adam" ends with a new "first" person and with the realistic insight that your own spaces cannot immediately be transformed from the miracle of an encounter into a utopia.

It's enough that the hit doesn't have to lie when it claims: "I'm fine when you're with me."