Teaser

Haqiqa

2026, 110 min, Film essay, documentary. Work-in-progress.
Directors: Anastasia Shubina, Timofey Glinin

Synopsis

Haqiqa is a poetic film essay on philosophy, identity, and Islam. In 2019, the filmmakers travelled across Morocco with Offsay (a pseudonym), a Belarusian philosopher who had lived in Russia. Having embraced Islam through books, he had never travelled beyond the former USSR. The Moroccan journey became both his first encounter with lived Islam and his first step into a wider world.

From the streets of Casablanca to the medinas of Fes and Marrakech and into Berber villages, the filmmakers documented daily life, while Offsay filmed his impressions with a pocket camera. Gradually, he disappeared from their images, leaving behind diaries, audio recordings, and video notes.

Years later, the filmmakers return to this archive. Haqiqa—an Arabic word meaning both truth and reality—unfolds as a dialogue between Morocco’s visible world and the inner flow of reflection. Offsay’s words and recordings intertwine with images, creating a polyphonic space where presence and absence, philosophy and lived experience, shift and blur.

The film does not explain Islam, Morocco, or philosophy but invites viewers into an experience of thought and transformation. Drawing on European thinkers in dialogue with Islamic philosophy and Sufism, Haqiqa approaches cultural encounter as a sensory journey, closer to contemporary art than conventional documentary. At a time of deepening divides, it offers contemplation—a meditation on thought itself and on fragile spaces where European and Eastern cultures meet.