L'mina by Randa Maroufi Screens at Hot Docs 2026

Hot Docs 2026, Toronto | L'mina, a Moroccan Short by Randa Maroufi Set in the Mining Town of Jerada

At Hot Docs 2026, the short film L’mina, directed by Randa Maroufi, will screen on Friday, April 24 at 9:00 PM at TIFF Lightbox 4. The screening is part of the Parasisi program and the Shorts section. For Souzian’s MENA coverage line at this year’s Hot Docs, L’mina is the first title to reach the screen; a short but richly detailed film that began its journey at Cannes Critics’ Week before arriving in Toronto. This year’s Hot Docs runs from April 23 to May 3.

Hot Docs 2026, Toronto | L’mina, a Moroccan Short by Randa Maroufi Set in the Mining Town of Jerada | Illustration by Souzian Dispatch

L’mina is a co-production between Morocco, France, Italy, and Qatar, and had its world premiere in the short film competition of La Semaine de la Critique at Cannes 2025, where it also received the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for Short Film. After that, the film went on to festivals such as IDFA, RIDM, DOK Leipzig, Dokufest, and several others, quickly becoming one of the notable short works of the year on the festival circuit.

Randa Maroufi, born in 1987 in Casablanca, is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work moves between cinema, photography, performance, and installation. Her official biography notes that her practice focuses on staging bodies in public and private spaces, an approach that often carries a political charge and questions the relationship between image and reality from the outset. Her education took shape in Tetouan, Angers, and Le Fresnoy, and her time at Casa de Velazquez and later Villa Medici has further deepened that path.

L’mina is also the final chapter of a trilogy Maroufi has made about three Moroccan cities. Le Park in 2015 and Bab Sebta in 2019 began this path, and now L’mina stands in some way as a summing up of that same vision. In 2022, she also launched Shatamata Production to develop projects that exist at the border between visual arts and cinema. This background matters for understanding L’mina, because the film does not emerge from direct reportage, but from a visual and collective process.

The film takes us to Jerada, a mining town in Morocco where coal extraction officially stopped in 2001, but in practice still continues. The film’s official synopsis across several sources’ stresses one point: L’mina looks at present-day labor in the informal shafts and reconstructs it with the help of the town’s residents, who appear on screen playing themselves. The IDFA description also notes that no real economic alternative has been offered to the region, and for that reason, workers still go underground in secret every day.

What matters here, of course, is the method of making. In her conversation with Cannes Critics' Week, Maroufi explains that the project was shaped from the writing stage onward through close contact with the people of Jerada, and that most of the characters play themselves. Because filming inside a real mine was too dangerous, she and her team reconstructed part of that world instead. The result is a film that does not simply observe Jerada from a distance, but rebuilds its memory from within.

• Ticket link for watching in Toronto: Hot Docs Site

• More information about the director: https://www.randamaroufi.com/bio/

• More information about the film: https://squareeyesfilm.com/shorts/lmina/

Follow Souzian Dispatch for our Hot Docs 2026 coverage of films from the Middle East and North Africa.