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Kenza Tazi is emerging as a filmmaker of formidable sensitivity and intelligence with her short film, Frères de Lait (Milk Brothers), which has been nominated among other short films for the upcoming Marrakech Short Film Festival.
Far from relying on her status as the daughter of cinematic icon Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi, she crafts a story that intersects culture, gender, and social critique, while also presenting the audience with a meditation on motherhood and societal prejudice that is intimate, morally probing, and deeply resonant.
A cinematic inheritance
“I have always been on film sets,” Tazi recalls in an interview with Morocco World News (MWN), describing a childhood spent observing her father, Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi, at work.
“Since a very young age, I was observing and asking questions about how a film set was working and how a film was made.”
Exposure to the mechanics of cinema sparked a passion that led her to Paris at 18, where she completed a double bachelor in Cinema and Management at La Sorbonne, followed by a master in Cinema and Audiovisual.
A subsequent master in Cinematography at Berlin’s MetFilm School allowed her to graduate as a Director of Photography, equipping her with a command of image that is precise and expressive.
Tazi’s trajectory, however, is not just technical. “Crafting images has always been my first passion, but then I found myself writing and the need to direct came,” she says. Her apprenticeship in European cinema sharpened her aesthetic sensibility, but her work remains inextricably tied to Morocco, its history, its cultural rituals, and its social realities.
Rediscovering forgotten spaces
The genesis of Milk Brothers lies in a nearly forgotten Moroccan institution: the Foundouk of breastfeeding in Fez. Here, new mothers once came to nurse other children, creating bonds of “milk siblingship” that transcended biological ties.
“It was not only visually beautiful, but also a symbol of female solidarity between newly mothers,” Tazi explains. She saw in the Foundouk a story that had been overlooked by history, a narrative ripe for cinematic resurrection.
In Tazi’s hands, the Foundouk is less of a backdrop and more of a character in its own right, observing the joys, anxieties, and quiet rebellions of those who inhabit it. The film centers on Meriem (Nadia Kounda), a single mother, who comes to nurse an orphaned child alongside her own son. Through Meriem, Tazi interrogates the moral and social strictures that constrain women, transforming the act of breastfeeding into a lens on cultural judgment and human compassion.
Motherhood vs moral judgment
In Milk Brothers, Meriem embodies the tension between pure human affection and societal condemnation. Single motherhood in Morocco carries a heavy stigma, yet Meriem’s love for Karam, the orphan, remains unmediated by convention.
“Whatever obstacles she will find in her way, she stays proud and will find a way to keep that connection with this baby. Because that’s what really matters in the end,” Tazi says.
The film shuns melodrama. Instead, it situates the audience within the quiet magnitude of Meriem’s tenderness, allowing each gesture, gaze, and caress to confront the arbitrariness of social censure. Tazi’s directorial restraint amplifies the moral weight of the story. In a society quick to label, she chose to foreground connection, choice, and the subversive power of love.
The film also brings to the forefront the ways gendered norms dictate intimacy and social bonds. In the Foundouk of breastfeeding, women historically shared care across biological boundaries, creating bonds of milk kinship that defied conventional hierarchies.
Yet these gestures, grounded in solidarity and compassion, collide with society’s obsession with labels and propriety. “The love and tenderness is pure. But at the time and still today, this doesn’t matter for society. Everything is labelled,” Tazi observes.
In this sense, Milk Brothers interrogates the cultural mechanisms that constrain women, exposing the arbitrariness of moral codes while honoring the resilience, courage, and quiet rebellion of those who resist them.
By making visible the struggles and agency of single mothers, Tazi forces Moroccan audiences to confront the taboos they may have unconsciously accepted, creating space for reflection, empathy, and perhaps change.
Crafting intimacy through collaboration
Central to the film’s success is Tazi’s collaboration with lead actress Nadia Kounda. “She understood exactly what I wanted from her: a strong and proud woman who always keeps her head high,” Tazi says.
Kounda, herself a new mother at the time of shooting, brought an authenticity to breastfeeding scenes that could not have been staged.
Tazi’s dual role as director and director of photography allowed her to translate this intimacy onto the screen with rare precision. Each frame is a careful negotiation of rhythm, gaze, and gesture, as if the camera itself becomes a participant in the act of maternal care.
“Having a woman behind and in front of the camera creates a form of intimacy and understanding,” Tazi observes.
Cinema as social conscience
Milk Brothers extends beyond personal narrative into subtle social critique. Through its lens, Tazi examines how Moroccan society and institutions regulate motherhood, often privileging law and convention over human connection.
“We can make viewers live in someone else’s feet, feel the character’s personal struggles… see how unjustified it is to separate a mother from a child for the only reason that she is single,” she explains.
This ethical interrogation is neither didactic nor sensationalist. Tazi’s film avoids condemnation; it asks viewers to reconsider the frameworks through which morality, gender, and kinship are defined. By making visible what is often hidden (the tenderness exchanged in the Foundouk, the resilience of single mothers), Milk Brothers asserts the capacity of cinema to challenge social hierarchies while preserving human dignity.
A quiet, radical gesture
Milk Brothers is formally restrained but morally expansive. It situates viewers within a universe where social judgment meets unmediated human affection, revealing the courage and tenderness of women who navigate this tension daily.
Tazi does not offer facile resolutions; she presents reality in its complexity, trusting audiences to recognize the radical potential of love that defies convention.
In this short film, Kenza Tazi demonstrates a rare combination of aesthetic mastery, social consciousness, and humanist sensitivity. Milk Brothers is a quiet revolution in Moroccan cinema, a work that asks its audience to see, feel, and reconsider what has long been invisible.
Through it, she establishes herself as a filmmaker capable of transforming heritage, memory, and social critique into enduring cinematic poetry.
