This Is Where I Sleep - Saïd
2013 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Annick De Vries, Ernest Godin, Eza Paventi
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
In a small Moroccan mountain village, Saïd learns the trails and gathers the equipment to one day guide tourists on hikes, while playing soccer and drawing the landscape that inspires him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A five-minute documentary about a kid in Morocco training to be a tour guide sounds like the safest, most predictable coming-of-age premise imaginable—which is exactly why it's almost criminal that most scouts would sleep on it, and why I'm genuinely curious what De Vries, Godin, and Paventi found in that simplicity that makes it breathe.
The film locates itself squarely in the observational documentary tradition while maintaining a lyrical restraint that recalls the best of contemporary nonfiction portraiture—the decision to interweave Saïd's practical apprenticeship with his drawings suggests a formal awareness of how landscape, labor, and imagination operate in the same frame.
What elevates this beyond gentle ethnography is the choice to treat Saïd's drawings not as supplementary texture but as a full language of seeing—the moment his pencil work appears alongside the mountain trails he's learning feels like the entire film suddenly clicking into focus, revealing that this is really about how a kid translates his world into possibility.