Welcome to 25 for 25 my project to watch and eat my way around the world in 2025 with 25 movies from 25 countries matched with 25 country themed dinners. Today’s entry is Morocco but you can see the full Masterlist to watch and cook along with me.
Country: Morocco
Movie: سيد المجهول [The Unknown Saint]
Director: Alaa Eddine Aljem
Year: 2019
The Elevator Pitch: A thief buries his loot on top of a hill before his arrest to keep it safe only to find that when he returns to claim it, a shrine to an unknown saint has been built around the “grave site” he made.
How Was the Movie?:
We had to switch very suddenly from Algeria to Morocco because we couldn’t find كرنفال في دشرة [Carnaval fi Dachra] with English subtitles and I took exactly 1 semester of Arabic about 10 years ago so that wasn’t going to work out so I didn’t have high hopes coming into the film but actually I really enjoyed it.
Despite what the Letterboxd reviews say, this movie about 5% Wes Anderson style film but it is very like much a Coen Brothers film. There are several characters whose winding stories occur in a rural town built outside of a shrine to a “saint” where life is difficult, verging on nearly impossible. The movie deals deeply with issues of faith and with the absurd things we endure in our lives when we believe in what we are doing. Its characters are all deeply committed people to things that might not be, at first blush, reasonable. The movie’s setting, deep in the middle of nowhere, leaves people tilting at windmills or in this case, building a shrine around an unknown grave that is no grave at all, venerating it to a healing holy site, and protecting it with the little resources they have (not knowing it is full of money that could solve the towns problems if only it were dug up and seen for what it is).
The movie is actually quite funny, verging on cheeky. The only thing that holds me back from recommending it is that the story is very thin. You can probably guess most of the beats of the story once they’re presented and they often feeling a little too pat and plodding to be truly great but it’s a solid movie with great dialogue and even better framing. A lot of the colors and framing are so good I wanted to pause the film and soak it up for a second.
Your mileage will vary on how interesting this movie is to you based on how much you’re interested in the interactions between people and faith (not necessarily god, but also not at all times the “saint” either). I’ve always been really fascinated by the concept and placement of saints in monotheistic religions. I grew up around a lot of Italian Catholics and while religious leaders would put the veneration of saints as god doing miracles through them, that did not seem to be the average persons understanding/working. I am also only really familiar with Islam through the lens of Sunni Islam from Yemen and Somali so seeing how different cultures and community react to perceived blessing is neat.
(I know saints and wali aren’t the same thing and also grave sites have difference religious practice around them but the end goal is the same where people move holiness from the center of god to the venerated person/grave site which is exactly what happens in the movie so that’s why I’m using the same word and also the translators of the movie did as well).
What was for Dinner?:
Sorry the pictures aren’t very good for dinner, I did not want to cook for some reason that day. I also felt guilty I wasn’t making something cooler because I make shakshuka fairly often. Generally I pair it with naan or chapati but flat breads don’t seem to be very popular in Morocco so I made khobz which is about halfway between a cornmeal bread I had in Montenegro and the usual country loaf I make regularly. Again, I was thinking this was cheating because it was so simple until this exact bread showed up in the film a couple times. This is the 6th or 7th movie where someone has been eating the thing I made which always makes me feel like I did something right! No surprises here, bread and shakshuka is great, highly recommend.
I also made chebakia for dessert which is a a fried pastry then dipped in honey. It’s supposed to be shaped like a flower but I got a little too Georgia O’Keeffe in my feelings I guess. I needed to have rolled the dough much much thinner for these to be more successful and I am starting to think I just hate orange blossom water (I actually think it smells terrible to the point I was worried it went bad several times). These are really unique cookies and the honey helps offset the orange blossom but I still didn’t like them enough to eat more than one or two. I also hate when my hands are sticky and because they’re soaked in honey and not a sugar syrup it didn’t penetrate the inside of the cookie as much as just hung on the outside. My husband polished off the rest of the plate, I’ll stick to jalebi if I want this type of dessert.
That’s it for Morocco, see you next in Latvia!