Radia is a film that dissects the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary pain and possibilities that live there.
By Joseph Jonathan
Sometimes, it is in the smallest gestures that a person’s world quietly unravels. Moroccan filmmaker, Khaoula Assebab Benomar, understands this intimately, and she anchors the opening minutes of her second feature, Radia, in these quiet fractures. In its first quarter-hour, the film observes its titular character, played with remarkable depth by Sonya Mellah, moving through the motions of her life with unsettling detachment. She struggles to eat a simple dinner of steak and wine, her gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the frame.
Her apartment is immaculate, arranged with a precision that borders on routine, yet she doesn’t notice the button that falls off her shirt as she prepares to go out the next morning. She sits on the shower floor and cries, then steadies herself enough to conceal the swelling on her face with makeup.
These moments are not dramatic in the conventional sense, but they are revelatory. Through them, Benomar stitches together the portrait of a woman whose emotional collapse is unfolding in silence. Something is deeply wrong, and the film invites us to lean in, not for explanation, but for understanding. It is only later that we learn Radia has recently lost her husband, and a chance encounter in an airport lounge with Aicha (Hafsa Tayeb), another woman navigating grief, disillusionment, and self-discovery, becomes the unlikely catalyst for Radia’s slow journey toward reclaiming herself.
Aicha is not a mirror of Radia; she is a counterpoint. Where Radia moves forward with slow, hesitant steps, Aicha retreats into a different kind of withheld energy. Where Radia’s grief is inward and coded, Aicha’s unrest is a visible force. Together, they form a duet of two women negotiating the rubble of lives that once made sense. They expose what is often left unsaid about loss: that emancipation is seldom a triumphal arrival and more often a process of dismantling the frameworks that once looked like protection.
Benomar is particularly interested in the invisible structures that shape women’s sense of self: the legacies they inherit, the expectations they are bound by, the emotional labour that goes unacknowledged, and the violence that cannot be legislated because it is woven into everyday life. Through Radia’s grief and Aicha’s simmering restlessness, the film examines how women internalise these structures, sometimes perpetuating them despite themselves.
Benomar’s formal choices are inseparable from her themes. The film’s decision to work in black and white is not nostalgic affectation; it is argumentative. The palette strips the world of easy sentiment and forces us to read bodies and spaces as signs. Deep blacks and bright whites suspend time in a way that colour might have softened. Shadows become psychological terrain, rooms become theatre for small violences and quiet restorations.
The filmʼs compositions are rigorous: faces occupy precise parts of the frame; domestic interiors are organised with a discipline that both comforts and claustrophobes. There is a structural austerity to the visuals that mirrors Radia’s own internal architecture — neat, controlled, brittle.
Editing is where the film makes its most radical claim on the viewer’s intelligence. Benomar refuses the spoon-fed rhythms of melodrama. The narrative proceeds through ellipses and silences; conversations truncate, actions are suggested rather than spelt out, and the camera lingers on moments that most directors would cut away. This impatience with exposition is not an evasion but a method.
By demanding that the spectator assemble meaning from fragmentary evidence, Radia enacts the very process of grieving: the constant stitching together of a life now missing a central seam. The result is a nervous, taut rhythm that keeps the viewer alert, sometimes uncomfortably so. It does not give answers; it makes questions.
The film’s intelligence is matched by the two performances that carry it. Sonya Mellah is devastating in her restraint. She never performs grief as spectacle; instead, she makes it a matter of posture, of breath, of the tiny mis-timings of ordinary acts. Her Radia feels lived-in, as if Mellah has found the precise register between presence and absence that the role requires. Hafsa Tayeb, as Aicha, is the necessary foil: briefer, sharper, more visibly strung. She brings an urgency and a kind of defiant awkwardness that destabilises Radia, and by extension, the viewer’s assumptions about what “moving on” should look like. Their interactions — sometimes conversational, sometimes merely proximate — create a field of emotional friction that reveals more than any speech could.
What is most compelling is how the film refuses to attribute blame to a single villain. There is no neat indictment here of one man, one institution, one tradition. Instead, Benomar is interested in the diffuse structures that shape women’s lives.
When Radia says, “They covered him in white and covered me with him. The color that made me a bride is the one that made me a widow,” she is naming not only how ritual can fold identity into symbolism, but something far more devastating: the way a woman’s entire sense of self can be structured around a husband until she becomes almost indistinguishable from him in the eyes of family, community, and even herself.
Her grief is not only for the man she has lost, but for the version of herself that existed only in relation to him. In that moment, the white cloth isn’t just a funerary symbol; it becomes a shroud for an identity that was never allowed to stand alone.
And Aicha echoes this collapse with even sharper clarity when she says, “They buried him as if they had buried a single body but two souls were gone with him”. Here the film deepens its critique: what is mourned is not just a man, but the woman swallowed inside a marriage so totalising that her autonomy dies with him.
The line crystallises what both women understand, each in her own way: that widowhood in such a context is not simply the end of a union, but an existential unhousing. One partner is lowered into the ground; the other is left wandering, stripped of the social identity that once defined her, expected to perform a version of herself she may no longer recognise.
In a film landscape that often equates female emancipation with dramatic rupture — flight, revenge, legal battle — Radia insists on the quieter, messier work of unmaking. The film’s refusal to end with a tidy resolution is, for me, a moral choice. Liberation here is not a narrative climax; it is a gradual reconfiguration of who Radia can be. Benomar resists cinematic closure because the life she depicts refuses it. That can be frustrating for viewers hungry for catharsis, but there is honesty in that frustration. Grief and agency don’t always coalesce into the tidy arcs we expect from fiction.
There are moments when Radia’s austerity risks alienation. Its elliptical logic can feel hermetic; the emphasis on silence and suggestion asks a lot of spectators who prefer character tracks to be spelt out. But this does not read as a failure so much as a commitment. Benomar is making a film that treats its audience like collaborators, not passive consumers, but interpreters. The editing choices that might seem abrupt on first viewing reward repeat thought, and the film’s formal rigour begins to look like ethical rigour: a refusal to moralise, to sentimentalise, or to simplify.
Sound design and score are used sparingly and with intention. Where music appears, it is often as counterpoint rather than cue, a fragment that unsettles rather than comforts. Ambient sounds, the scrape of cutlery, the hum of an apartment building, the distant announcements of an airport lounge, register with particularity. These are the sounds of a life in small pieces, and they anchor Radia’s realism even while the visuals work in a more stylised black-and-white register.
On a production level, the film’s modest budget is never an alibi for looseness. The production design is careful, the costumes and interiors precise; there is a coherence that suggests a disciplined collaboration between director and crew. Raouf Sebbahi’s production stewardship — evident in the film’s compositional clarity and tonal consistency — shows that political and formal ambition need not be hostage to resources.
Ultimately, Radia asks you to do what good cinema should: to pay attention. It is a film that dissects the ordinary to reveal the extraordinary pain and possibilities that live there. It resists the consolations of plot and prefers the unsettling truth that emancipation is a process without a fixed endpoint. In Mellah and Tayeb, it finds actors who can carry that burden of ambiguity, and in Benomar, it finds a voice that is patient, unflinching, and, quietly, radical.
Radia screened at the Abuja International Film Festival (AIFF) 2025, and it is the sort of film that benefits from festival viewing — from an audience’s collective patience, from the hush that allows small details to breathe. It is not a crowd-pleaser in the conventional sense, and it does not attempt to be. It is, instead, a conversation starter: an invitation to rethink how we narrate women’s lives, losses, and slow recoveries.
Rating: 3.9/5
*Radia had its world premiere at the Critics’ Week of the Cairo International Film Festival 2024, won the Best Director at the Khouribga International African Film Festival 2025, before making a stop at the Abuja International Film Festival (AIFF) 2025.
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.