Sofia Alaoui Signs WME Talent Agency

Sofia Alaoui is a part of WME now.

Sofia Alaoui, a writer and director, has a contract with WME for comprehensive representation. She is still represented by Ithaka Media's Jerome Duboz.

Alaoui, a French-Moroccan filmmaker who was born in Casablanca and raised in China, aspires to make cinema that crosses borders and reimagines genres.

Alaoui got a special jury medal for artistic vision after presenting her feature directorial debut, Animalia, at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The movie is a science fiction movie with political issues that are grounded in reality.

The scenario of an alien invasion in Imilchil, a Berber community in the Atlas Mountains, is shown in her short film So What If The Goats Die, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and the César Award for Best Short Film in 2021.

Since then, Alaoui has turned her attention to television and is currently working on the Let The Earth Burn series with Mns Mrlind (The Bridge). The series made its debut in March at the Qumra Arab Film and TV Series Concepts Incubator hosted by the Doha Film Institute.

In a recent interview with Variety, Alaoui disclosed that the show was motivated by actual kidnappings of Moroccan toddlers dubbed Zouhri, whom the kidnappers believed to possess extraordinary abilities.

“I read about these kidnappings in the newspaper, and I thought, ‘This is crazy!’” Alaoui said then.

“The [medieval] practice is that they sacrifice these young children in order to gain some supernatural force themselves. I said to myself: How can this still exist? And I wondered whether these crimes say something about the society.”