Red Path

Up on the mountain, in a beautiful rocky area where they weren’t supposed to go, Nizar (Yassine Samouni) introduces his younger cousin Achraf (Ali Helali) to a tiny grey baby goat which has been rejected by its mother. He says that his older brother, Mounir, told him to let it die, but a succession of children choose to care for it. The tension between the ways in which adults and children view the world is one of the driving forces in Lotfi Achour’s heartbreaking interpretation of a real life tragedy.

Nizar believes that the mountain is the best place for goats, as well as a place where they might find water to go swimming in, but their parents don’t want them up there at all. Towards the end of the film, we see lightning strike it during a ferocious thunderstorm. There are dangerous forces in such places. Here – as brutal and unknowable as the fury in the clouds – is another: the Mujahideen. When the story has barely begun, the boys are captured by them. Nizar, suspected of spying, has his head severed from his shoulders. The dazed Achraf is ordered to return it to their village.

The first third of the film deals with the seeming impossibility of completing this awful task, and the remainder with what happens afterwards. Achraf, bright and playful in the early scenes, is wrenched away from childhood. When we encounter other boys playing football, the abruptness of that change, the difference between the life that should have been his and where he is now, is painful to behold. But he’s still too young to be able to engage fully with the adults as they respond to the siatuation. Often he finds himself on the sidelines, watching, trying to process it all. He reaches out to an imagined or otherwise summoned version of Nizar for advice, and also finds himself growing close to Rahma, the girl Nizar loved.

Rahma’s story is an interesting one. Though we don’t follow her all the time, we learn that she is one of at least five local girls going to school, an opportunity that Achraf is missing out on. It’s far too dangerous to send a girl out alone with goats in the situation the villagers face, so the boys perform these tasks whilst the girls are invested in a different way. It is they who represent the future of the village; even though they will likely leave it for the city, there’s a good chance that they will get jobs and send money back. In a traditionally patriarchal society, it is this that embodies the change the adults long for, a better way of living. They are striving for a future directly opposed to the values of the Mujahideen.

In this experimental context, Achour also experiments with filmmaking techniques. At times we see the action in the first person, as if looking directly through Achraf’s eyes as he moves around his home. This helps to embed us in the intimacy of that space, to connect with a life that has been built around routine and family togetherness, a world now destined to slip out of his grasp. Here and elsewhere, Achour does a fine job of binding us to his adolescent hero’s perspective, as the boy tries to process the death and what it means within the limited framework of ideas available to him. Religious, cultural and mythical ideas intertwine with very personal concerns, dominating his thinking even as the adults are trying to focus on the practical and how to protect those who remain.

The film is beautifully framed , beginning in the narrow spaces of mountain gullies and gradually opening out to reveal the vastness of the landscape. With the understanding that there is a bigger world out there comes awareness of how vulnerable the village is. What seemed like cosy, reassuring domestic spaces come to seem like scant shelter from a huge and unpredictable world. Red Path is a tough watch – with a still more tragic postscript – but an impressive piece of cinema.

Reviewed on: 20 Jun 2025