A million miles from the contemplative tone of his award-winning debut Mille Mois, Faouzi Bensaidi's What a Wonderful World is a dizzyingly inventive and witty take on life in modern day Casablanca. At its centre is the lovelorn assassin Kamel, played with near-silent insouciance by the director himself. After each hit, Kamel calls his favourite prostitute Souad, only for her best friend, Kenza, to answer the phone. Gradually Kamel finds himself falling in love with her voice and sets out to meet his mysterious femme d'amour. From this deceptively straightforward premise, Bensaidi weaves together a hypnotic tapestry of life in the big city that incorporates elements of silent filmmaking, slapstick farce, animation and ballet-conducting traffic wardens all set against a genre-defying waltz of Arabic and Western sounds. With What a Wonderful World, Bensaidi has fashioned an irresistibly wry, whisky-sour study of falling in love, its fleeting glory and eternal futility. Put simply, what a wonderful film.

Morocco-France, 2006 / Fawzi Ben Saidi
with Faouzi Bensaïdi, Nezha Rahil, Masdouki Hajar
90 mins