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Directors’ note

Since my first visit to Fez in 2012, I was intrigued to see the gardens in the old medina often placed at the heart of family houses and palaces. These enclosed courtyards, with a fountain at their center, once symbolised natural abundance and the thriving culture of the Royal City of Fez, Morocco’s former capital. Today, many of these gardens lie abandoned, the result of modern lifestyles, pollution, and the neglect of traditional water systems. Yet, even as they slowly turn to ruin, their presence in daily life remains unmistakable.
Through my friendship with Rajae and the stories of others I met, I came to see how the gardens are part of a culture of living together. As spaces, they reach beyond the walls that enclose them. In Rajae's childhood memories, gardens are places of adventure and mystery; for a Sufi brotherhood, they hold rituals connected to water; in traditional songs and poetry, they become metaphors for the perils of love.
I began to understand the intricate web connecting the gardens to other spaces – domestic and public, intimate and spiritual – that make up the hidden structures of the city. I came to see them as repositories of time within a changing urban landscape. In the film, I explore these gardens as spaces in between, where past and present, sacred and the mundane meet. In intimate settings, real images merge with imaginative recollections, creating a dialogue between what is seen and what can be felt. The gardens are a lens to observe these different worlds that once coexisted without saying.

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Heidi Vogels (1978, NL) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam, where she studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Her practice unfolds through long-term research into the garden as a layered and heterotopic space – a place that connects nature and culture, the domestic and the public and the tangible and the imagined. Through this lens she charts narratives that lie beyond immediate perception, tracing the complex stories embedded within an urban environment in collaboration with local residents. The outcomes of which take the form of film, and extend to installations and participatory programs that activate and share these findings. As co-initiator of Bureau Postjesweg– art space in Amsterdam nieuw-West, she developed Garden Collectives, a program engaging communities with garden spaces, and she served as art program director for documentary art festival Cracking the Frame Presents. 
Vogels’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including Le18 in Marrakech (MA), Jut Art Museum in Taipei (TW), TENT in Rotterdam (NL), and Do-a-Front in Yamaguchi (JP). Across her projects, she continues to explore the interwoven fabric of urban space, culture, and the garden as a place that is simultaneously physical, social, and virtual.

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Thank you

This film has been made possible with the support of The Netherlands Film Fund, Mondriaan Fund AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), VSBfonds, Otherwise film, and with great help of local partners Culture Vultures Fez Sefrou, Institut Francais Fes, American Language Centre, Embassy of the Netherlands, in ongoing exchanges and friendship with Rajae Drissi, Mohammed El Hadri, Rachid Haloui, Mohammed Laamin, Kadija Alaoui Yazidi, Hassan El Raoui Lahsen, the expertise of M’allem Abdarrahim Amrani Marrakchi and the Hamadcha Brotherhood, M’allem Abd al-Rzaq, Frédérique Calmès, the amazing production team, and foremostly, the people of Fez.  

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