“Imichki,” a 15-minute short film directed by Moroccan-Canadian filmmaker Yza Nouiga, will make its world premiere in the fiction category at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), putting Morocco in the spotlight at this year’s festival.
Set in 1975 in a village in southern Morocco, the film follows Meriem, a young woman who has heard nothing from her husband after he left to work in France. Unable to read or write, she nevertheless does everything she can to send him a message, turning an impossible act into a quiet form of resistance against his absence and the limitations imposed by her world.
A Letter to Those Who Left
The film’s title comes from Tachelhit: imichki refers to those who left and never found their way back, people said to have forgotten their homeland. Nouiga said she explored the major waves of departures that shaped Morocco throughout the 20th century, from forced recruitment during the colonial period to rural exodus and the many people who sought to migrate to Europe or elsewhere in Africa. These departures left behind villages filled with stories of those who were absent.
While researching these stories, the director came across a traditional song, a timnadin, in which a woman expressed her wish to “be a letter, folded inside her beloved’s suitcase.” That image became the starting point for Nouiga’s screenplay. “That image opened up another world in my imagination. As I explored the stories of those who left, I came across the women who stayed behind. They spoke of absence with a restraint that moved me,” the director said.
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“Imichki” seeks to give shape to this sense of absence through Meriem’s eyes as she searches the landscape around her for a presence that has disappeared. “I felt that desire is strongest in what cannot be expressed. I imagined how this woman hoped to find the missing body again: through what path, through what gesture. By going to ask for news or by going to meet him. Perhaps it was through memories that she was best able to find him again. And as those memories were summoned again and again, they gradually turned into fantasies until they came to inhabit the landscape around her,” Nouiga continued.
About Yza Nouiga
Born and raised in Morocco, Yza Nouiga moved to Canada, where she studied screenwriting at INIS. She received the National Film Board of Canada award as part of the Talent Lab at the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM) for her project “Jwad Amira.” Her previous short film, “Jardins Paradise,” had already screened at several festivals. Through her emerging body of work, the filmmaker repeatedly explores questions of heritage, transmission and women’s place in society.
