Mati Diop, Talal Selhami and Larissa Sansour discuss their different routes to genre at Marrakech’s Atlas Workshops.

International festival programmers are sitting up and paying attention to the rise in genre cinema by Arab and African filmmakers.

Mati Diop’s genre-bending drama Atlantics wowed Cannes Competition earlier this year, with Algerian psychological drama Abou Leila screening in Cannes Critics Week and Tunisian horror film Dachra for Venice Critics’ Week in 2018.

A group of filmmakers gathered to discuss their routes into genre filmmaking at a panel talk ‘Unearthing the Fantastic’ held during the Atlas Workshops of the Marrkech International Film Festival last week.

Two men drive into the Sahara, which becomes a surreal landscape in more ways than one in Abou Leila, from debuting filmmaker Amin Sidi-Boumediene. Set during the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s, like Mounia Meddour’s Papicha, the other Algerian debut premiering in Cannes this year, this intentionally disorienting work runs over two hours and is literally and figuratively a trip that isn’t only captivating but tries to take its viewers captive. Not interested in naturalistic conventions or historical recreations, Sidi-Boumediene instead uses the world of dreams and the tools of cinema to try and approximate the complex headspace of ...

Litigante by Franco Lolli will open the parallel section.

Cannes Critics’ Week has unveiled the line-up for its 58th edition, running May 15-23.

Scroll down for full line-up

French-Colombian director Franco Lolli will open the parallel section, devoted to first and second films as well as shorts, with his contemporary drama Litigante.

The Bogotá-shot, character-driven tale revolves around a female lawyer facing a series of personal and professional challenges, including her mother’s cancer diagnosis. It is Lolli’s second feature after Gente De Bien, which premiered in Cannes Critics’ Week in 2014.

“It’s rare that we select a second...