An Arab Melancholia

Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running after his dream to become a movie director. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco. This autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Taïa's identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures, creating a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery.