Hakim Belabbes' Whispers follows a man's obsessive search for his lost childhood through the dark alleyways and desolate cemeteries of the director's Moroccan hometown, Boujad.

We follow the director's camera into the kitchens and living rooms of a community of Moroccan women. inside the walls of their apartment in Casablanca's old Medina, the women cook, clean, take care of their families and help each other. With their hands in the dough, in the soap whilst washing the laundry, doing the house chores, in the market or at the hammam, between laughter and tears ("We are housewives, that's all. ... Our sport? House cleaning!"). These courageous women, proud of their role, talk about their miserable lives with a great sense of awareness, but without self-pity. They show a surprising vitality, curiosity for life and solidarity. These house-proud housewives may not all know how to read, but they know exactly what would improve their lives: equal rights for women and men, more money, and a better future for their children so they wouldn't have to emigrate to support the family. A sense of hope and the possibility of change radiate out of the everyday lives of these heroines ("batalett").

“Do not be sad, my son, you are destined to fall in love.” An intervention-reading of a concert by Egyptian musician Abdelhalim el Hafiz, performing The Fortune Teller by the poet Nizar Qabbani. "My son you are 10 years old, I look at the life you have ahead of you and today it gives me vertigo. But it is not fair, perhaps because I am seeing it from my decline, I no longer have the drive that is becoming strong in you now, that is growing every day; this whirlwind of dust, but also of beauty that will take your life, like ours, like a leaf in the wind. Perhaps it was you and Yasmin who recently crossed the dense city sky... I remember as if it were yesterday in the wastelands, you picked up a translucent stone that shone in the sun when you showed it to me and now I know that you are that star you were holding in your hands".

A man planned to get married. From there, everything starts. A series of photos, which retrace his evolution (death, separation, distance and birth) in a fixed frame with a masculine voice in off which tells us the invisible stories behind the photos.

Boujad is a personal and anguishing look at issues of separaton, independence and return. As director Hakim Belabbes chronicles his journey from his home in Chicago to visit his family in his hometown of Boujad in Morocco, his exploration of family relationships is self-conscious and at times painfully honest. We witness his most private moments with his family. Belabbes' film intimately explores the domestic spaces and religious rituals of intra-family relationships, especially when compounded by one member's break with traditional values.