Director Tazi is more blunt. There is no legislation to protect local films against imports. The action takes place in a remote coastal town that is loomed over, literally and figuratively, by a Spanish enclave garrison housing prisoners of Generalissimo Franco's regime. Each day, a Spanish soldier sets out to the village well to fetch water for the enclave, where he secretly meets and falls in love with a local fisherman's daughter. Meanwhile, a schoolteacher from Casablanca has moved to the village along with his wife.
Friendship grows naturally between the wife and the village society.
Inevitably, they are caught, and stoned for their transgressions. It is the images that speak, that cry out the violence and intolerance. Paradoxically, it is an old woman who throws the first stone in the final scene. Still, she believes Tazi stereotyped women as victims in his film. I'm happy he's talking about women.