Stallions stand in the silver water of the Atlantic, tended by the men who ride them. These riders are a brotherhood bound by Tbourida, a centuries-old ritual rooted in warfare, in which horsemen in ceremonial dress charge in a single line and fire their rifles at the same instant. Tala Hadid travels with them across central Morocco, from one saint’s festival to the next, and watches everything that surrounds the charge: the men dress one another, care for the horses, wait, argue and eat. In the saddle, the farmer becomes a general, the young man a prince, the labourer a hero.

Hadid, who also shot the film, lets documentary and fiction blur until it no longer matters which is which. Its three movements each open with a card laid down by the riders themselves, and it builds through recurrence. The sea, a horse, a costume, a voice. The daughter of the troupe’s leader wants to ride and is refused; later, at the great gathering of Moulay Abdesalam, her voice returns through a stallion that speaks. Mobile phones and motorbikes sit alongside gestures that seem centuries old. The result is a vernacular epic, and a portrait of Arab men at work and at play, capable of great force and equal tenderness.