Critic Reviews

It is a film which celebrates empowerment and the exhilarating release of finding a voice and being heard.

Casablanca Beats drums its ideas loudly and effectively. The result is a boisterous and crowd-pleasing delight, showing a community with deep specificity that nonetheless speaks to the concerns of young people all over the world.

Casablanca Beats argues that the power of personal expression can turn the world on its head. And for a good spell, the film does just that.

There’s no revolutionary moment of success in which the meanies are ousted and hip-hop declared godly. Music is like education in this: it’s all about the movement, not the destination.

Ayouch’s aesthetic is natural, the performances he gets from his actors true. It’s no small feat to get kids acting like kids onscreen. The musical breaks and classroom discussions are both engaging and provocative.

Ayouch’s most personal feature film, it infects the audience with its passion and the unshakable belief that a person who has self-confidence and self-expression can really change society.

It’s perhaps a little glib to make a choral event of a hip-hop musical when hip-hop is so much a medium for individual creative expression — for a single voice to speak its truth — but it’s hard to argue when the results are this energetic, this empowering and this irresistibly youthful.

Hip-hop isn’t dead, the film energetically insists; it’s just been hiding in a Moroccan slum.

It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.

Ayouch means well, interpreting the teens’ connection to rap music as emblematic of a rebellious spirit, yet deeper discussions on other social issues – politics, women’s rights, religion – are unfortunately reduced to mere sources of frustration, either ending abruptly or remaining incomplete.