Director Azlarabe Alaoui's film Kilkis...The Town of Owls won the Al-Quds Grand Prize for Best Artistic Production along with a Special Mention for Best Production Design at the 34th Alexandria Mediterranean Countries Film Festival, which closed yesterday, Monday, October 8.

Kilkis...The Town of Owls world premiered at the Oran International Arabic Film Festival. The film's events take place at the Town of Owls, an isolated residential community situated in the High Atlas Mountains. It is inhabited by families and guards of a secret political prison camp, which remained out of history for a long time until the early 1990s. The Town of Owls is in fact a titanic prison in which everyone, including guards and residents, are held detainees.

Written and directed by Azalarabe Alaoui, Kilkis...The Town of Owls stars Med Rzin, Amin Ennaji, Hassan Badida, Kamal Elkademi and Asmae Srioui. MAD Solutions handles the film's distribution.

Azlarabe Alaoui is a Moroccan director, screenwriter, and producer. Alaoui is also a university professor with a Ph.D. in the Audio-visual and cinematic field. He made a myriad of films in a wide array of genres, yet focused more on human rights issues.

Azlarabe Alaoui made five short fiction films, including Bidouza (2004), The Island of a Day (2005), See You in Volubilis (2006), Cedar Grains (2007), Izorane (2008) and The Blind and the Gypsy (2013). Correspondingly, he directed a group of documentary films for Al Jazeera Documentary Channel concerned with marginalized and socially oppressed people and produced a series of historical documentaries for the first Moroccan channel about celebrities who visited Morocco between 1830 and 1998.

As for TV films, he directed The Devil's Powder in 2009, Glass House in 2010 and The Postman in 2011. He made his debut feature film Androman... Blood and Coal in 2012, which won 17 national and international awards. Kilikis...The Town of Owls is his second feature film.