While visiting family in Marrakesh for the summer, Myriam Achour (Mélissa Guers) and her cousin end up at a club where the former starts flirting with an attractive man. When the women mock him and his friends for acting rich and superior despite throwing dirham at the dancers instead of Euros, they decide to have some fun dancing themselves while rebuking the crass tips they forcibly pass along before their reaction gets them feigning the money was a joke.
The one thing these men can’t play off, however, is the fact that one decides to take a clandestine video of Myriam with that man in a private room. We know straight away that this nonconsensual footage will inevitably prove a major narrative revelation in the future, but I’m not sure I’d ever have guessed the fallout. Because I wasn’t thinking just how ingrained the hate for women and the opposite religion is for Muslims and Jews alike.
Whereas so much of today’s media about the Middle Eastern conflict stems from the violence they inflict on each other, Hanaël El Yousfi’s The Daughters of Abraham focuses on how that animosity spills over until they’re also inflicting violence upon themselves. And for what purpose? The Achour and Benkemoun families are both from Morocco. Their youngest generations were all born in France. I often wonder if such innate cultural similarities fuel the fire.
Because it shouldn’t be that way. In a perfect world, religion wouldn’t matter; love would trump indoctrination. But that’s not often the case. Not when Ary Gabison’s character considers Myriam’s brother Mohammed (Syrus Shahidi) to be his own, despite his family not even knowing he exists—let alone that he’s Muslim. It’s definitely not when Myriam dated the Benkemouns’ golden son only for him to choose the “Jewish community” over her.
This is why Myriam sours when Eva Benkemoun (Ava Baya) appears at Mohammed’s wedding. She hasn’t seen her friend in years—not since she helped split her brother and her up. She didn’t do it because she didn’t want her sibling dating a Muslim. No, she didn’t want Myriam hurting more later knowing he would still cave to their parents’ pressures after promising the world. The hypocrisy is to the point where Eva would choose celibacy over dating a Jew.
And that hypocrisy is everywhere around both—especially as they’re women in families beholden to patriarchal attitudes. You couldn’t blame Myriam if she also refused to date Muslims since, besides Mohammed’s authentic progressiveness due to attending business school abroad, her examples of Muslim men are her well-meaning yet old-school father (Younès Bouab’s Abdel) and sensitive yet obviously toxic brother (Bilel Chegrani’s Sofiane).
Add Eva’s Kool-Aid-drinking older sister Shana (Gabrielle Cohen) defending their mother’s (Vanessa Liautey’s Martine) drunken racism and it’s almost like she and Myriam are living in a nightmarish prison from which the only escape is leaving them all behind. To their credit, Eva’s dad (Michel Mimran’s Michel) and Myriam’s mom (Jalila Talemsi’s Fatima) are the exceptions. They’re the ones we know made their daughters strong, idealistic, and uncompromisingly free.
That’s why El Yousfi’s film places them in situations that would break anyone else. Situations that finally do break Sofiane and Shana, who both hold religion as their identity so tightly that rejecting the baked-in violence would mean rejecting themselves. What happens when Martine speaks out of turn about Myriam to Myriam without knowing? Or when that video gets out and everyone decides Myriam is to blame instead of the men?
We’re effectively eased into the escalating ramifications of these issues; first by meeting the players and endearing ourselves to their desire to be better than the stereotypes placed upon them. We have fun with Gabison’s wedding speech, get enthralled by Baya’s singing, and champion Guers’ wit and confidence in the face of casual slights on Myriam’s character and culture. El Yousfi sees the humor in these dynamics and lets her actors thrive in it.
Then the curtain starts to slip. We begin seeing how most of the problem-solving is fatigue-driven deception and willful ignorance. Characters discovering the simplest out from a potentially explosive scenario is appeasing both sides by keeping them far apart. Yes, it’s quiet insofar as not needing to deal with the fallout now or (wittingly or not) choosing a side, but it’s also just delaying an inevitability devoid of guardrails.
I expected the burst of rage and pain and sorrow. I didn’t expect how it would manifest, despite being the only logical result of sweeping major issues under the rug rather than confronting them head-on. The longer you wait, the farther gone the participants become. That’s when mothers tell their daughters it’s okay not to love their husband. It’s when husbands take credit for everything good their children do and blame their wives for everything bad.
Both the Benkemoun and Achour families are pushed into an unexpected reckoning. Some wish to pretend it never happened. Some have the compassion to be disappointed yet supportive. Some choose violence—physical and / or emotional. Guers shines as the focal point from which it all originates, but every actor has their moment. Special mention goes to Talemsi and Cohen for expertly portraying the conflict between heart and mind.
The Daughters of Abraham thus culminates in an intense third act devoid of easy answers that had me enthralled, truly uncertain how it would shake out. Where would forgiveness reside? When would the victims be allowed to fight to protect themselves? Who would take responsibility for allowing the hateful rhetoric and actions perpetuated by cultures that prevent their participants from believing their own eyes to continue? Self-hate runs deep.
The Daughters of Abraham premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival.
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