The film begins with joy. A Moroccan family comes together for a celebration filled with laughter, tradition, and togetherness. But the festivities are violently disrupted when a dark truth emerges: Hassan, a 20-year-old, has been secretly harassing his 12-year-old cousin. Suddenly, the family is thrust into a devastating moral crisis. Do they protect the family’s reputation at all costs, or do they confront a reality that threatens to tear them apart? There is no easy escape, and Festa in Famiglia refuses to offer simple answers. Instead, it forces its characters, and its audience, into the uneasy space between denial, protection, and accountability.
For Nadir Taji, born in Cremona in 2000 to an Italian-Moroccan family, the story is deeply personal. “Who, truly, is to blame in the moment of tragedy?” he asks in his director’s notes, a question that has haunted him since childhood. Growing up in a household shaped by his father’s strictness and his mother’s leniency, Taji lived between the Arab and Western worlds. The contradictions he observed at home, between discipline and freedom, principles and compromise, became the seed of Festa in Famiglia.
This duality is reflected in his cinematic approach. Taji chooses to avoid showing the adults’ faces, instead centering the camera on the children. In doing so, he turns the youngest family members into the true battleground of the conflict. “What interested me wasn’t so much the severity of Hassan’s actions,” he explains, “but the reasons that drove him to ignite such chaos, and the fragile balance the parents must strike between values and protecting their family.”
Stylistically, Taji adopts the perspective of a neutral observer. The narrative feels detached, almost judicial, refusing to force empathy or assign easy blame. The result is a film that feels both intimate and universal, confronting issues of violence, silence, and complicity without falling into moral judgment. This deliberate restraint allows Festa in Famiglia to probe the deeper cultural short circuits at play: the tension between Western notions of right and wrong and the ingrained belief, shared across many societies, that the family must remain intact at all costs. The film suggests that the very awareness of these opposing values is what creates the most painful inner conflict for the parents.
At only 24 years old, Nadir Taji is already establishing himself as a filmmaker unafraid to tackle the most difficult subjects. After studying directing at Rome’s prestigious Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and honing his skills on television sets, he has channeled his fascination with truth, family dynamics, and cultural identity into a debut feature that is as unsettling as it is necessary. As Taji himself puts it, the film does not seek to provide answers. Instead, it opens a space for reflection, on guilt, responsibility, and the fragile line between protecting those we love and confronting the truths we fear the most.