Mon Taxi (2026)
Mon Taxi did something I do not often let short films do to me. It moved me. I will be honest here, the experimental, avant-garde documentary short is usually a form I admire more than I actually enjoy, all mood and montage with not much to hold onto. Meriem Sakrouhi's eight-and-a-half-minute film is the exception that reminds me why the form exists at all, because underneath its collage of image and sound there is a real, aching feeling, and a story that quietly builds until it lands a proper emotional punch.
On its surface it is something like a video diary. Sakrouhi, a Moroccan film-maker living in New York, narrates her days in the city, and the film splices that narration together with images and video of the life she is living now, the noise, the rush, the sirens, and of the family and the home she has left behind. The two worlds talk to each other across the cut, her present and her elsewhere, both held in the same warm, searching voice, and it slips between them so gently that you stop noticing the seams.
What makes it work is how beautifully it marries sound and image. This is a film that understands a documentary can be built out of texture as much as information, and Sakrouhi has a real ear and eye for the way a single sound or a single frame can carry a whole feeling. There is a lovely, quiet rhyme running through it, too. Early on she talks of being overwhelmed by the noise of the city, the sirens and the endless din of it, and by the end she finds herself missing exactly those sounds, aching to get back to them. That turn, from overwhelmed to longing, is the whole film in miniature.
And then it does the thing that lifts it from lovely to genuinely affecting. Late on, it reveals that all of this, the narration, the voice, the daily ritual of the film itself, grew out of the calls she used to make to her father every single day on her way to work. The film is dedicated to his memory. Once you know that, the whole thing quietly reframes itself, and what felt like a diary reveals itself as a love letter and an act of grief, a daughter still talking to a father who is no longer on the other end of the line. It is genuinely moving, and, crucially, it earns that feeling in a way so many films about loss never quite do.
Four stars. Mon Taxi is a small thing that holds a great deal, tender, formally lovely, and quietly devastating in its final movement. It won over a viewer who usually keeps this sort of film firmly at arm's length, and it did it in under nine minutes. Seek it out.
Reviewed from a screener provided by the film's press team. Mon Taxi is directed by Meriem Sakrouhi and receives its European premiere at the BFI London Film Festival.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Morocco: The Message (1976), Moolaadé (2004), El Alamein: The Line of Fire (2002)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More documentary: Kikuyu Land (2026), In Conversation: Louise Lockwood on Bel, Bel (2026)
