Cannes 2025. At the close of the 64th Semaine de la Critique, the short film L’Mina by Randa Maroufi won the Leitz Cine Discovery Prize for Short Film, the accolade that each year honours the most innovative work in the category. The 26-minute film, a co-production between France, Morocco, Italy and Qatar, reconstructs – with the help of local residents – the labour carried out in the coal pits of the Moroccan city of Jerada, where extraction has been officially banned since 2001 yet continues clandestinely.
L’Mina completes the trilogy that the Franco-Moroccan director has dedicated to three cities in her homeland, following Le Park (2015) and Bab Sebta (2019), both of which collected multiple prizes on the international festival circuit. Produced by Shatamata Production (France) with support, among others, from the Doha Film Institute, the Sharjah Art Foundation and Fondazione In Between Art Film, the short emerged from an artistic workshop lasting more than three years, involving local craftspeople and European professionals.
Partly shot on Super 8 mm by film-maker Wiame Haddad and enriched with 3D scans and intricate post-production work, the film blends documentary form with staged scenes, allowing the real miners to play themselves. In its citation, the Semaine jury praised “the immersive power and visual audacity” of the piece, highlighting its “political and poetic urgency in giving voice to an invisible community”.
With this recognition, L’Mina joins an honours list that in recent years has seen short-film auteurs such as Pedro Almodóvar and Carlo Sironi celebrated. After its world première on the Croisette, the film will continue on the autumn festival circuit and has already been acquired for international sales by Square Eyes.
WE ASKED LUCA COASSIN TO TELL US ABOUT HIS COLLABORATION WITH THE DIRECTOR AND HIS CINEMATOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO THE FILM:
“After the multi-award-winning Bab Sebta: Ceuta’s Gate and The Park (Small Gold Camera 300 at the Manaki Brothers Film Festival 2016), L’Mina is my third collaboration with Randa Maroufi, an artist who prefers to describe herself as a visual artist rather than a film-maker, as her work diverges from traditional cinematic language. L’Mina is both an evolution and, at the same time, a further experiment compared with the previous films. The production was a major team effort: a large crew was involved in the preparation, the shoot and the post-production. Many professionals contributed to a short film that is nevertheless extremely dense, developed over a period of more than three years.
From a cinematographic perspective, the film brings together footage conceived from the outset for intensive post-production with Super 8 mm material shot by Wiame Haddad, all to be integrated with the substantial portion filmed on a studio set. We were therefore running two sets in constant flux. Every shot was a fragment of a puzzle that would ultimately fuse in the edit into a single continuous take. The short’s architecture only truly emerged at the end of the process: a journey into the mines of Jerada through the faces and bodies of the real protagonists rather than actors. A bold, highly experimental work — a portrait of authentic life.
Never before had the cinematography been required, from the very outset, to operate in perfect synergy with the production design, so as to give Randa complete freedom of movement and expression. Colour tests and on-the-fly alterations to the sets turned the shoot into a rigorous yet stimulating work-in-progress.
Our whole approach to cinematography was targeted at the final grade, yet it was likewise steered by a meticulous use of optical and colour-metric parameters, allowing us to render every human and environmental element in front of the lens with maximum control. Confronted with “human material” of rare beauty and authenticity, I had to rein in my instinct as a stills photographer—often drawn to painterly inspirations—and instead adopt reflected-light set-ups that were deliberately unmotivated, pared back to the essentials. I aimed to sustain a natural realism on the border between documentary and fiction, while remaining faithful to Randa’s vision. Optically, the Leica Summicron lenses gave me millimetric control over depth of field: a few centimetres’ shift, even at several metres, would have changed the visual message. I also needed image quality and definition sufficient for post-production, without needlessly racking up huge Ks of data.
I thank all my collaborators — assistants, grips, electricians, data managers, colorists, DITs, etc. — without whom the profession of cinematographers could not exist. And, of course, thanks to Randa, who allows me to experiment and learn something new in every project.
