Otman Qrita Takes Aim at How Morocco Gets Photographed

Otman Qrita has built a career spanning fashion, photography and film. After seven years at Belgium fashion house Dries Van Noten, his work gained momentum with A Quiet Rebellion, a short film and photo series for GQ Arabia that led to a wave of commercial commissions.

The turning point was New Cavaliers. Released in 2024, the film explores the horse-riding culture he had been watching in Morocco since 2019, an idea he had wanted to make for years.

The chance came when Highsnobiety offered him complete creative freedom on a Reebok commission.

Shot in a week, New Cavaliers won the Special Jury Award at the 2025 Young Director Award in Cannes and opened the door to larger productions and international work.

Its success also exposed a tension familiar to many artists with diasporic backgrounds. The moment your work draws attention to your heritage, people start expecting that heritage to define everything you make.Qrita, 37, was born and raised in Lille to a Moroccan family, and describes both places as having shaped him.

"Lille is very important to me because it's had a large impact on what I like and how I feel, but I also have a strong relationship with Morocco," he told Cairo Scene.

"I always have through my family, and I spent a lot of time there when I was young. At home, there was a very strong Moroccan cultural vibe."

He was fascinated by photography and filmmaking early. "When I saw my father recently, he pulled up old photos and videos that I'd already been taking back in the day."

At the time he never thought it could be a career. He studied IT, moved to New York at 19, returned to France for fashion school, and eventually settled in Paris, where he joined Dries Van Noten.

"I actually started there working in PR, which wasn't what I wanted to do, but I needed to get my foot in the door in fashion."

The role changed as Instagram reshaped fashion communication, and he was handed the job of launching the brand's social media.

"When I started there were zero followers. By the time I left I'd built it to around half a million," he said.

After seven years he wanted to make his own work. "I knew it was the moment where I wanted to work for myself and explore more of my creativity."

A friend invited him to help shoot and produce A Quiet Rebellion, a short film and photo series for GQ Arabia about young hijabi women in skateboarding. The team expected little.

Within a week of release it had half a million Instagram views.Commercial commissions followed, with campaigns and editorials for Adidas, Jordan, Salomon and GQ France, along with a return to where he started: Dries Van Noten, where he directed and shot the brand's Spring/Summer runway shows.

Then came Highsnobiety in 2024, the carte blanche Reebok commission, and the chance to finally make the film about the horse riders he had watched every summer in Morocco.

After New Cavaliers, brands and creatives kept approaching him to make work about Morocco, positioning him through his heritage. He is proud of that background and wary of being reduced to it.

"I didn't want to become pigeonholed as 'the French-Moroccan director'," he said.

"I can be inspired by Morocco in the same way that I can be inspired by London, there is nothing different."

What frustrates him more is how Morocco tends to get represented. He has no time for the sentimental or colonial gaze.

"The cliché about Morocco is like, 'Oh, they're so poor, look at these people, they're trying to do their best'. I really dislike this," he said.

Too often, he said, creatives return to their countries of origin and reproduce images of hardship and nostalgia built for Western audiences.

"Every film or photo becomes like a UNICEF advert. Of course there are people suffering, just as there are everywhere, but that's not the Morocco I'm interested in showing."

What draws him instead is contemporary Morocco: its youth, its energy, and the universality of the people he meets there. The country inspires him because it reflects the same spirit he finds elsewhere.

"Take for example my film New Cavalier. It was shot in Morocco, but that film could be made in Colombia and it would have been the same," Qrita said, adding that his work doesn't exist to confirm someone else's idea of a place, or of him.

That thinking extends to fashion, which has stayed at the core of his practice. For Qrita, styling is narrative rather than decoration.

During the production of New Cavaliers he rejected the first wardrobe choices sent over because they felt disconnected from the people he was photographing.

"I like it when fashion is real and not forced, when the clothes have something to say," he said.

"Whether photographing a policeman, or just an old random grumpy lady, clothing shapes character."

His eye for it comes from childhood. His mother made her own clothes, and his father wore a suit every Sunday.

"I hate the cliché, but 'dress to impress' is real. Clothes give you the room to be playful, and this is major in my work," he said.

His attention now is on something new: a 10-part photo book series documenting his visual obsessions, inspired by the Dedication mixtapes of his favourite rapper, Lil Wayne.

"He was dropping 10 mixtapes a year that he was giving away for free, so I have 10 books on obsessions," he said.

"The first three are done already. The first is about all the statues in Paris, the second one is about a guy called Danny, a bodybuilder from Manchester that I've been following for a long time, and the third is about the crazy objects I find on the floor."

Seven volumes remain. "When they're done they'll only be available together, as one complete set. It'll be the most elaborate artistic project that I have ever done."