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How a pair of slum kids are turned into killers, by the tiny trials of life as much as by Islamist brainwashing, goes under the microscope in an ambitious Cannes film based on the 2003 Casablanca attacks.

“God’s Horses” by the French director of Moroccan origin Nabil Ayouch follows the destiny of two brothers, Yachine and Hamid, from their childhood up to the day they each pack a bomb on their backs and choose to die for Allah.

“I’ve had enough of hearing that poverty and oppression equals suicide bomber,” Ayouch told AFP on Saturday, after a screening at the festival’s Un Certain Regard new talent section that earned him a standing ovation.

“That’s a short cut you hear a lot, both in the West and the Arab world. But you can’t just take a kid and brainwash him to kill. If that were true, there would be millions of suicide bombers.

“I wanted to understand exactly how some kids — who remain kids until the end — can be made into suicide bombers,” said the 43-year-old.

From the rough-and-tumble of the childhood football pitch, to the thuggery and injustice the brothers face as they try to make a living as young adults, his film depicts two lives at the bottom of the pecking order.

Because of his lowly status, the shy Yachine pines after a local girl who will remain agonisingly out of reach, guarded by her family for a better marriage prospect.

When Hamid — his elder, tougher brother — is jailed for defying a local bigwig, he returns transformed by an encounter with Islamist “brothers”, drawing his sibling and their childhood friends in his wake.

Ninety percent of Ayouch’s cast including its two lead actors are non-professionals, recruited from the vast Casablanca slum of Sidi Moumen where the real-life bombers were enrolled by Islamic extremists.

The film was almost entirely shot in a shantytown a few kilometres from Sidi Moumen, reflecting the deeply limited horizons of its characters, one of whom travels into the city for the first time the day of the attacks.

“Of course poverty is part of the reason. But it’s all the tiny traumas of existence,” Ayouch said. “A mix of social, economic and intellectual poverty, of broken family structures with absent father figures.

“And when a personal destiny comes into contact with a bigger story, with geopolitics, that’s when the extremist recruiters can come into play.”

Soon after the May 2003 suicide attacks, Morocco’s deadliest ever which left 33 dead as well as 12 bombers, Ayouch shot a documentary on the families of the victims and survivors.

“But I later realised I had forgotten some of the victims,” he told AFP. “Twenty-year-old kids who go and blow themselves up are victims as well.”

At first he shows the Salafist militants who move into the slum in the early 2000s offering a road out of the squalor, promising order, honour and discipline to a band of lost kids.

Gradually their message becomes more radical and their demands more insistent, until the brothers and two of their friends find themselves enrolled on a suicide mission.

Tragically, in the case of Yachine, the bombing is clearly a way to assert his battered young manhood, far more than any act of faith or anger.

The film draws its title from a phrase used in the days of the Prophet Mohammed, which has been co-opted by modern-day jihadists, something Ayouch finds “both terrible, and terribly poetic.”

Born to a Jewish French-Tunisian mother and a Muslim Moroccan father, he grew up in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles but spent all his childhood summers in Morocco and drew on personal experiences for the film.

In particular, he included an excruciating scene in which one little boy in the brothers’ gang is raped by an older one — a phenomenon as taboo as it is common according to Ayouch.

“Because they don’t have access to girls of their own age, people’s natural sexual awakening is replaced by rapes among kids — which are extremely widespread,” Ayouch said.

“I saw scenes like that — I was even once caught in a scene like that, and was rescued just in time by a cousin,” he told AFP.

Far from gratuitous, the scene is one of a series that hint at the harmful effect of strict sexual segregation in Islamic societies.

“When you love and you are loved back, it’s a lot harder to go and blow yourself up,” Ayouch said.

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Country music legend Loretta Lynn is three years older than she has led people to believe, an age change that undermines the story she told of being married at 13 in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

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A Romanian director who exploded onto the scene five years ago by capturing the Cannes Film Festival‘s top prize pleaded with critics Saturday to go easy on his latest contender.

Cristian Mungiu, who stunned the cinema world with his Palme d’Or win for the chilling Communist-era abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”, is back in the running with the true story of a deadly “exorcism”.

The hotly awaited picture “Beyond the Hills”, like its much-loved predecessor, looks at two young women bound by an intimate friendship who try to navigate in a hostile world with each other’s support.

But the similarities stop there and Mungiu, 44, begged reviewers from around the world not to compare his new tragedy with “4 Months”, at a press conference after a screening that met with a split chorus of boos and applause.

“It’s best for this film if people will manage to see the film so I hope journalists will manage to appreciate it as an independent film… without comparing it to anything else and especially (not) to my previous film,” he said.

“Beyond the Hills” is based on a horrific 2005 case in which a young woman, Irina Cornici, died after an Orthodox Church session in the remote Tanacu monastery of eastern Romania to rid her of purported demons.

In the film, co-produced by the Belgian two-time Cannes winners the Dardenne brothers, Cornici is renamed Alina and grows up with her best friend Voichita in the notoriously grim orphanages set up by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

The picture charts the diverging paths of the two women as young adults, with Voichita choosing God and becoming a nun while Alina seeks a fresh start in Germany.

But her experience in the West proves traumatic — Mungiu hints at sex trafficking — and Alina returns home to find her friend at the monastery and tries to convince Voichita to leave with her.

Voichita, however, asks her to stay and while at Tanacu, Alina suffers bouts of schizophrenia and violently lashes out at the priest and nuns, who take her to a local hospital for treatment.

The chief doctor quickly releases Alina back into the monastery’s care and a visit to her foster parents turns sour, as she is let down yet again by those meant to help her.

Back at Tanacu, the priest and nuns become convinced that Alina is possessed by the devil and attempt to “save” her by gagging her and binding her to pieces of wood nailed together in the form of a cross.

She is held for several days and forced to fast while the priest orders the reading of prayers used in the Orthodox Church to expel the devil.

Emergency services are called in when she faints after the ceremony and Alina is declared dead a few hours later.

The priest and nuns were jailed in 2007 for manslaughter over Cornici’s death.

Mungiu said that while it was clear that the young woman was a victim, he was most interested in what people did in the name of love and good intentions, and acknowledged that his non-judgemental approach could alienate viewers.

“I don’t want the film to be liked. I hope the film will challenge people to have an opinion and I am very sure that the film is going to be seen very differently here and in Romania,” he said.

Mungiu, the most prominent example of the so-called Romanian new wave in cinema, lamented the state of his country’s film industry, saying his compatriots were being raised on Hollywood schlock and that the love of independent pictures was being “lost”.

“The problems that we’re having are not financial,” he said.

“The problems that we’re having (are) that the cinema which is very much appreciated here for being radical and pure and going for the answers — it’s not popular back home.”

“Beyond the Hills” is competing against 21 other pictures for the top prize at Cannes, to be awarded on May 27.

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Rocker Nick Cave and director John Hillcoat on Saturday took a swipe at the “failed” war on drugs as they presented their “Lawless” Prohibition-era rural gangster movie at Cannes.

“Prohibition still exists today. It still fails epically, with the so-called war on drugs,” Cave, who wrote the script, said after a press screening that saw the work by his fellow Australian get a restrained clap.

“Lawless” features Tom Hardy, Shia LaBeouf and Guy Pearce with Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain as the love interests in a violent slice of hillbilly moonshine myth-making based on a true story from the 1930s United States when alcohol was banned.

Hillcoat said that he saw many parallels to today “with the economic crisis, the political crisis, the war on drugs”.

He said he made a montage that was due to start the film that showed modern-day Mexican drug cartels, then moved back “through the 80s and the Cubans and cocaine and heroin in New York, and went way back and landed on Prohibition”.

“That was the birth of serious organised crime and it’s been going ever since. So it feeds into all of those things that are going on today,” he said, adding that he later decided not to include the montage.

Cave, a former heroin addict, said later in an interview with AFP that “to me personally, this disastrous war on drugs is an absolutely unbelievable waste of money.

“Seven percent of criminals in jail are on drug-related offences. It just seems to me that prohibition still exists today and it still doesn’t work,” he said.

He said he believed the solution was to “legalise all drugs and let all those people out of prison and I would spend the money in a more judicious way.”

Asked if he meant hard drugs like cocaine and heroin should be made legal, he replied: “The whole lot, yeah.”

“There is a major problem and it’s not being dealt with at all.”

Based on Matt Bondurant’s “The Wettest County in the World”, “Lawless” is one of 22 films in the running for the Palme d’Or top prize at Cannes to be handed out on May 27.

It gets its red carpet Cannes premiere on Saturday evening.

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The Cannes Film Festival hit back at charges of sexism in its official line-up Saturday, saying it would continue to select pictures based solely on their merits.

In response to a mounting row over the all-male selection for the competition at the world’s top cinema showcase, the event’s board said in a statement that it was committed to diversity, but on its own terms.

“The Festival de Cannes — in order to maintain its position and remain true to its beliefs rooted in universal rights — will continue to programme the best films from around the world ‘without distinction as to race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status’,” the board said, quoting from 1948′s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“The board members fully endorse the decisions made by Thierry Fremaux, General Delegate for the Festival de Cannes,” it added.

More than a thousand women film-makers and others have signed a US petition in support of French feminists protesting a lack of female directors in the running for the Cannes top prize.

The petition — headlined “Where Are the Women Directors?” — was launched this week by 250 signatories including “Toy Story 3″ producer Darla K. Anderson, director Gillian Armstrong and feminist icon Gloria Steinem.

By Friday, some 1,050 women in the business from as far afield as Australia, Brazil and India had signed the online appeal, which urges Cannes jurors “to commit to transparency and equality in the selection process of these films.”

There are no female film-makers among the 22 competing for the Palme d’Or, the top award at the May 16-27 festival, and just two among the 17 in its new talent section: France’s Catherine Corsini and Sylvie Verheyde.

French feminist group La Barbe (The Beard) wrote a scathing op-ed article in last weekend’s Le Monde newspaper, noting that “all 22 films in the official selection were written, what a happy coincidence, by 22 men.”

Last year’s event featured a record four women in competition, sparking hopes that female directors were making lasting inroads at the event.

British film-maker and Cannes juror Andrea Arnold told reporters on the festival’s opening day Wednesday she would hate to be selected on gender grounds, and stressed that the line-up simply reflected a lack of women directors in general.

And US actress Jessica Chastain, appearing in two films at Cannes this year, told AFP Saturday she found the debate “silly” and said pictures must speak for themselves.

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