‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me,’ ‘La Más Dulce,’ ‘Chapa 100’ Score Top Prizes at Atlas Workshops
“Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me”, “La Más Dulce,” and “Chapa 1000” claimed the top postproduction and development prizes at this year’s Atlas Workshops, which ran from Nov. 30 – Dec. 5 as part of the Marrakech Film Festival.
Co-winner of the top award, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me” walked away with a €20,000 post-production grant. Directed by Asmae El Moudir, the film retraces the life of Fatimazahra, a young woman born with a rare genetic disorder that made exposure to sunlight deadly. She lived a parallel, nocturnal existence and founded a community known as the Children of the Moon. Following her death in 2023, the group traveled to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to live beneath the polar night, seeking a world where darkness offers safety.
“We’re talking about a rare disease with a very strong antagonist: the sun,” says El Moudir. “What normally represents joy becomes a source of danger. For this community, light can kill. In that sense, the project is like a vampire film made real. We’re exploring how this hidden community lives among us — a community most people don’t even know exists — but I don’t want to portray them as victims.”
This is the second time El Moudir won the Atlas Workshops’ number one grant. Her previous effort, “The Mother of All Lies” would later score Cannes’ best documentary award, as well as the Un Certain Regard directing prize, before making history as the first Moroccan film to win Marrakech’s Etoile d’Or. The filmmaker remains an Atlas Workshops’ emblematic success story – and she’ll soon be back behind the camera for a second bout of production ahead of a 2027 delivery.
Post-productions jurors Beatrice Fiorentino (Settimana Internazionale della Critica), Martin Gondre (Best Friends Forever), and Hania Mroué (Metropolis) decided to give two top prizes, also awarding €20,000 to Laila Marrakchi’s “La Mas Dulce,” a story about agricultural exploitation in Andulusia following a pair of Moroccan women hired for a season of strawberry picking.
“The film reveals their courage, their determination, and their struggle to denounce the injustices and abuses they suffer,” says Marrakchi in her director’s statement. “It also shows that, despite the initial promise of freedom and financial independence that leads to forced exile that ultimately distances them from their families and their country, an unbreakable bond is formed between them.”
Lucky Number handles world sales, with a 2026 festival berth highly likely.
Rounding out the post-production winners, director Mohammed Hammad’s “Safe Exit” and “Goma Enough Is Enough,” from filmmaker Elisé Sawasawa, claimed additional post-production grants. Hammad’s “Safe Exit” follows a security guard struggling with PTSD in the aftermath of a 2015 ISIS massacre, while Sawasawa’s doc follows the everyday Congolese who picked up arms to defend their families after city of Goma fell to rebels this past January.
On the development side, top honors went to Ique Langa “Chapa 100,” a love-story between aging street vendors in Mozambique that soon assumes more magical realist and poetic dimensions. This is Langa’s second feature; his debut “The Prophet” is expected to make a festival debut in 2026.
Development jurors Karim Aïtouna (Haut les Mains Productions), Ama Ampadu (BFI Filmmaking Fund) and Olivier Père (Arte France) also awarded Boubacar Sangaré’s “Les Dieux Delinquants,” Scandar Copti’s “A Childhood” and Kamy Lara’s “Vanda” with additional financial support.
The awards capped a second consecutive year of growth for the workshops, which welcomed 60 distributors from across the Middle East and North Africa through the newly launched Atlas Distribution Meetings.
“These distribution professionals aren’t always present at major international markets, and when they are, they’re few in number and not necessarily a top priority for pressured sales agents,” says Atlas director Hédi Zardi.
He notes that European and Arab distributors even asked to meet simply as colleagues. “I saw a Lebanese distributor chatting with a Polish one — they have nothing to sell each other, yet were eager to talk. That’s exactly what we hoped for: putting everyone in the same space to spark conversation. Deals may come later, but the main goal was for them to meet and discover things together.”
Despite the influx of distributors, overall industry attendance stayed in line with previous editions — and the Atlas chief prefers it that way.
“We must stay boutique,” says Zardi. “We want these informal encounters to happen naturally. If we lose freshness and spontaneity, we lose our essence. Some people who came the first year returned later and told us it feels exactly the same — and we need to preserve that while improving each time. We’ve reached our desired scale.”
This year’s mentor was Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, who left his mentees with this advice: “Don’t overdevelop.”
“It’s wonderful to get feedback, and even better to receive development funding but don’t spend years in development. We’re eager to see your films!”
He later followed up to Variety: “I believe cinema has the power to challenge the stereotypes so often applied to people or regions we know too little about. From this perspective, Atlas makes a significant contribution to the visibility of a fascinating part of the world. If we watch more films from this region, we may discover that we’re not so different after all.”
Since 2018, the workshops have supported 180 projects, among them more than 70 Moroccan films. Since the post-production prize was introduced in 2020, the top winners have all gone on to premiere in Cannes or Berlin, with respective victors “Feathers” and “The Mother of all Lies” collecting prizes out of Critics’ Week and Un Certain Regard.
Co-winner of the top award, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Up on Me” walked away with a €20,000 post-production grant. Directed by Asmae El Moudir, the film retraces the life of Fatimazahra, a young woman born with a rare genetic disorder that made exposure to sunlight deadly. She lived a parallel, nocturnal existence and founded a community known as the Children of the Moon. Following her death in 2023, the group traveled to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to live beneath the polar night, seeking a world where darkness offers safety.
“We’re talking about a rare disease with a very strong antagonist: the sun,” says El Moudir. “What normally represents joy becomes a source of danger. For this community, light can kill. In that sense, the project is like a vampire film made real. We’re exploring how this hidden community lives among us — a community most people don’t even know exists — but I don’t want to portray them as victims.”
This is the second time El Moudir won the Atlas Workshops’ number one grant. Her previous effort, “The Mother of All Lies” would later score Cannes’ best documentary award, as well as the Un Certain Regard directing prize, before making history as the first Moroccan film to win Marrakech’s Etoile d’Or. The filmmaker remains an Atlas Workshops’ emblematic success story – and she’ll soon be back behind the camera for a second bout of production ahead of a 2027 delivery.
Post-productions jurors Beatrice Fiorentino (Settimana Internazionale della Critica), Martin Gondre (Best Friends Forever), and Hania Mroué (Metropolis) decided to give two top prizes, also awarding €20,000 to Laila Marrakchi’s “La Mas Dulce,” a story about agricultural exploitation in Andulusia following a pair of Moroccan women hired for a season of strawberry picking.
“The film reveals their courage, their determination, and their struggle to denounce the injustices and abuses they suffer,” says Marrakchi in her director’s statement. “It also shows that, despite the initial promise of freedom and financial independence that leads to forced exile that ultimately distances them from their families and their country, an unbreakable bond is formed between them.”
Lucky Number handles world sales, with a 2026 festival berth highly likely.
Rounding out the post-production winners, director Mohammed Hammad’s “Safe Exit” and “Goma Enough Is Enough,” from filmmaker Elisé Sawasawa, claimed additional post-production grants. Hammad’s “Safe Exit” follows a security guard struggling with PTSD in the aftermath of a 2015 ISIS massacre, while Sawasawa’s doc follows the everyday Congolese who picked up arms to defend their families after city of Goma fell to rebels this past January.
On the development side, top honors went to Ique Langa “Chapa 100,” a love-story between aging street vendors in Mozambique that soon assumes more magical realist and poetic dimensions. This is Langa’s second feature; his debut “The Prophet” is expected to make a festival debut in 2026.
Development jurors Karim Aïtouna (Haut les Mains Productions), Ama Ampadu (BFI Filmmaking Fund) and Olivier Père (Arte France) also awarded Boubacar Sangaré’s “Les Dieux Delinquants,” Scandar Copti’s “A Childhood” and Kamy Lara’s “Vanda” with additional financial support.
The awards capped a second consecutive year of growth for the workshops, which welcomed 60 distributors from across the Middle East and North Africa through the newly launched Atlas Distribution Meetings.
“These distribution professionals aren’t always present at major international markets, and when they are, they’re few in number and not necessarily a top priority for pressured sales agents,” says Atlas director Hédi Zardi.
He notes that European and Arab distributors even asked to meet simply as colleagues. “I saw a Lebanese distributor chatting with a Polish one — they have nothing to sell each other, yet were eager to talk. That’s exactly what we hoped for: putting everyone in the same space to spark conversation. Deals may come later, but the main goal was for them to meet and discover things together.”
Despite the influx of distributors, overall industry attendance stayed in line with previous editions — and the Atlas chief prefers it that way.
“We must stay boutique,” says Zardi. “We want these informal encounters to happen naturally. If we lose freshness and spontaneity, we lose our essence. Some people who came the first year returned later and told us it feels exactly the same — and we need to preserve that while improving each time. We’ve reached our desired scale.”
This year’s mentor was Palme d’Or winner Cristian Mungiu, who left his mentees with this advice: “Don’t overdevelop.”
“It’s wonderful to get feedback, and even better to receive development funding but don’t spend years in development. We’re eager to see your films!”
He later followed up to Variety: “I believe cinema has the power to challenge the stereotypes so often applied to people or regions we know too little about. From this perspective, Atlas makes a significant contribution to the visibility of a fascinating part of the world. If we watch more films from this region, we may discover that we’re not so different after all.”
Since 2018, the workshops have supported 180 projects, among them more than 70 Moroccan films. Since the post-production prize was introduced in 2020, the top winners have all gone on to premiere in Cannes or Berlin, with respective victors “Feathers” and “The Mother of all Lies” collecting prizes out of Critics’ Week and Un Certain Regard.