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This film is a portrait of Hadda Ouakki, an exceptional woman, who arrived in Casablanca during the time of expansion and development of this city - in the late sixties - a little over ten years after the end of the French protectorate in Morocco.

Hadda Ouakka is an illiterate Berber Moroccan Cheikhat, representative of the Amazigh culture, now aged of sixty, who refused to be married and to have children, thereby posing an act of great rebellion in the traditional society that was her.

Indeed, even though she lived alone with her nomadic family in the Moroccan Middle Atlas, Hadda always wanted to sing. At fourteen, she annul the marriage her parents had imposed to her because they did not want that she become an artist singing in front of men. At only fifteen years, even she did not know what could be a large city, what could be Casablanca, Hadda - against the wishes of all her family - flees his tribe. This was in 1968 and, the following year, Hadda starts recording discs and cassettes and was soon known throughout all Morocco.

For over forty years this woman continues to be, in herself, a real manifesto of freedom. She is an emblematic representative of the remarkable determination of so many Arab women who, like her, have struggled and are still fighting - long time before the Arab Springs - to obtain and enforce their freedom of women and artists.

I also choose Hadda Ouakki because of her expressive songs, build on the power of the ancient poetic beauty who fear neither humor nor the use of provocation.

Indeed, based on an ancient musical and poetic culture, Hadda Ouakki can sing the innocent and imaged song like this: "Health is not a fabric, it is not selling at the market. Once damaged, nobody can stitch up his rags! ". But she can also sing a love that questions franckly the religious :"Oh scholar Imam! Why do you extend your speech, when the lover has traded his horse to make a fantastic gift to his beautiful tattooed lover... "Or," When the handsome boy throws me his soft look, my whole body is shaking, I lose all my faculties, I cannot defend myself against his beauty. "
This portrait of Hadda Ouakki also gives me the opportunity to revisit the past of an almost mythical city which become the Moroccan economic capital. Indeed, Casablanca then start a development that was not without impact on artists living there, because many workers who left their countryside, to work in the city, soon felt a nostalgia and desire to find their roots, especially through the singing of the cheikhats. This led to the emergence of many places where men could go to calm down their blues, providing to musicians many concerts opportunities.

We will do this trip in the past with Bennacer Oukhoya - the master of Hadda Ouakki, now aged of eighty years - who will also tell us his musicial career in the city of Casablanca of that time.