The renowned French director has just released a new film. This time he whisks the audience off to the Sahara.
The long wait is finally over for fans of Gilles de Maistre’s films. Widely released on 8 April, L’Enfant du Désert tells the story of a feral boy who lived with ostriches. In his signature style, the Parisian filmmaker once again places children and wild animals in the same frame, asking what happens when the boundary between their worlds dissolves. This time, the question is nature versus nurture. The film’s own tagline cuts to the heart of it: quand la nature sauve l’homme – when nature saves man – suggests that the wild world does not merely shape us, but that without it, something in us is lost.
As all of de Maistre’s works, L’Enfant du Désert is a cinematographic parable. It centres on Sun, a fourteen-year-old girl who has published a book inspired by her grandfather’s bedtime story: the tale of Hadara, a nomadic child lost in a sandstorm at two and raised by ostriches in the Sahara. When Sun is invited to visit the desert, what had been a story begins to feel like a place she has yet to understand. What is this place, and who is Hadara?
That question is filtered, in the film, through Sun’s eyes. But what the desert asks of her is hard: to set aside what she thinks she knows and remain open to what she finds.
Video via STUDIOCANAL France on YouTube
Genuine understanding, of animals, of other cultures, of the natural world, always requires surrender of received ideas before there is room for new ones… It is the theme that runs quietly through all of de Maistre’s work. In L’Enfant du Désert, that idea finds perhaps its most direct expression yet.
The “ostrich boy”, Hadara, really did exist. He was lost by his parents in a Sahara sandstorm at the age of two, and was adopted by ostriches. He grew up ferally with them, without access to traditional socialisation. At the age of 12, he was rescued and taken back to society and his parents. He later married and had children. But eventually, he returned to his ostrich family. The story of Hadara is often told in West Sahara. In 2000, Hadara’s son Ahmedu shared his father’s story with the Swedish author of children’s books, Monica Zak. Although a mix of true memories and the author’s creative license, the story is essentially true.
A Double Dose of Creativity
Gilles de Maistre and his wife Prune de Maistre are the creative power couple who have already delivered such successful films as Mia and the White Lion, The Wolf and the Lion, The Black Jaguar, and Moon le Panda.
It was Prune who had discovered Monica Zak’s book L’Enfant Autruche about the real Hadara years earlier, while the couple were occupied with another film. The idea, therefore, had to wait. It was only during the Covid period that de Maistre finally read it and understood, by his own account, that Prune had been right to keep it.
De Maistre admits that his first reaction to his wife’s idea of turning Hadara’s story into a film was scepticism: he was working with lions at the time and simply could not picture himself with ostriches. It was only when he finally read the book that his resistance gave way. “I realised how misunderstood the ostrich is,” he says, “an extremely powerful animal, with a spur capable of killing predators.” But for a filmmaker whose work has always placed the human-animal relationship at its centre, that power was not a problem to be managed but the whole point.
Authenticity, not strangeness, was what struck de Maistre most about Hadara’s story. This was not Mowgli. This was the documented account of a real child who survived outside human society for a decade, re-entered it, was socially educated, and eventually chose to return to the desert. For de Maistre, that distinction matters enormously. “This is no longer theory,” he says. “It is lived human experience.” The central question his film presses on – what in a human being is innate and what is acquired – is one that philosophers have argued for centuries without resolution. Hadara’s case does not resolve it either, but it brings it out of the abstract and into something visceral and real. This story may be the closest thing to a real-life answer.
Prune de Maistre, his wife and the sole screenwriter of all their productions, is as central to these films as the director himself. A former investigative journalist and television researcher, she brings the same rigour to screenwriting that she once brought to documentary work: before a single scene is written, she spends months immersed in the source material, cross-referencing, verifying, and building the narrative from the ground up. Her scripts, which have driven films seen by millions across more than forty countries, are tested on their six children before they reach the screen, ensuring the story speaks as honestly to a child as to an adult.
Making the Unlikely Pairing of Children and Ostriches Work
Bringing the story to the screen required, as it always does with de Maistre, an unusual combination of patience and pragmatism. The casting of three actors to play Hadara at two, six, and twelve demanded not only physical resemblance but families willing to commit to months in the Moroccan desert. Nahïl, who plays the youngest Hadara, came to de Maistre’s attention through his parents, long-time admirers of the director’s work. He was, de Maistre says, immediately compelling: “so intelligent, perceptive, and brave.”
For the older two, Zayn Sekkat at six and Nahel Tran at twelve, the decisive test was not in a studio but in a field with ostriches. De Maistre took all the candidates to meet the animals directly, to see who could handle the proximity and who could not. The three boys chosen turned out to share more than a passing physical resemblance. On set, Nahel quickly came to regard the younger two as little brothers. People in hotels regularly mistook him and Zayn for each other. The youngest became, in his words, “our little mascot, our little star.”
Before it came to that, though, Nahel had come home from school one afternoon to find that his little brother had left him a note. “I have bad news,” it read. Inside: “You got the role of Hadara.” He jumped around the room. What followed was rather more demanding than the note had suggested. Nahel had written in his audition that he was not especially close to animals, framing the prospect of working with ostriches as a challenge rather than a pleasure.
Intrigued, de Maistre cast him anyway, and the preparation began in Belgium before moving to Morocco. Nahel learned that ostriches are acutely sensitive to human energy, that they peck at everything, that their legs can be genuinely dangerous, and that the only reliable approach is calm. He describes the process in almost meditative terms: learning to breathe with the birds, to move without alarming them, to earn rather than demand their trust.
A breakthrough came before filming even started, when an ostrich sat down for him during a preparation session. It sounds unremarkable. To Nahel, it was a small victory he still remembers with pride. At one point during the shoot, he recalls, he was so absorbed in the work that he stopped noticing the discomfort altogether. “I wasn’t hungry,” he says. “I just wanted to keep filming.”
De Maistre builds every production around that kind of connection. “Our method is not to train animals but to collaborate with them,” he says. “We build bonds between them and the actors, using people who naturally know how to form those connections.” The ostriches brought to the production had been rescued from a Moroccan breeding farm where they were destined for leather; the fennec foxes arrived via a seizure by the Moroccan authorities. Neither species was a conventional choice, and the preparation was accordingly demanding. “Training animals by force is dangerous and ethically unacceptable,” de Maistre says. “The safest approach, for both humans and animals, is building a gentle relationship.”
If Nahel’s experience was one of gradual discovery, Zayn Sekkat’s was something closer to instinct. He arrived on set already comfortable around animals since his earliest childhood, with a dog at home and years of horse riding behind him. The ostriches did not intimidate him. “It was pretty easy,” he says, “because I’m not afraid.” He loved the fennecs unreservedly, running with them across the dunes at every opportunity. Asked whether he ever felt lonely during scenes in which his character appears entirely alone in the desert, his answer was immediate: “No, never. The animals played with me.” It is a child’s remark, and it is also one of the film’s central ideas stated in its simplest possible form.
The same instinct for unexpected casting runs through the human roles. The part of Sun, the fourteen-year-old girl at the heart of the story, was written by Prune de Maistre for the couple’s own daughter, Neige. It was not the first time Neige had worked with her father, but the path to that collaboration had been anything but straightforward. De Maistre had initially resisted the idea entirely. “I was afraid my emotions as a father would interfere,” he admits. Neige insisted, and he relented, and then, “she ended up creating her character and surprising me,” he says. “It was a success.”
The dynamic between them is less that of a director casting a known quantity than of two people who have learned, across several films and a certain amount of negotiation, to trust each other’s instincts. As for her long-term future in front of the camera, de Maistre is affectionate but measured. “I see her more behind the camera,” he says, with the tone of a father who has learned not to push his luck.
The casting of Kev Adams (pictured below) as Christian, Sun’s grandfather, raised a few eyebrows. Adams is one of France’s most recognisable comic actors, and de Maistre’s films are not, by any obvious measure, comic territory. But that, in a sense, was precisely the point. Adams had reached out to de Maistre during the making of Autumn and the Black Jaguar, expressing admiration for his work. They met, got along immediately, and de Maistre filed the encounter away.
When the role of a young grandfather came up, he saw in Adams something that his public profile had rarely been asked to provide: restraint, seriousness, a different register entirely. “When he’s on set, something happens,” de Maistre says. “He’s precise and powerful.” It is a casting instinct consistent with everything else about the production: look past the obvious choice, and trust what you find underneath.
The Secret Star: The Sahara
The location itself deserves its own acting credits. For all its visual appeal, the Moroccan Sahara is not exactly a forgiving place to make a film. Temperatures swing from bitter cold before dawn to punishing heat by midday. Sandstorms descend without warning. The most beautiful locations are invariably the hardest to reach. Yet the desert also offers the unexpected. Unusual rainfall during the shoot produced temporary lakes across the sand, images so rare that de Maistre incorporated them into the film on the spot. No production designer could have planned them, and no studio could have replicated them. It is the kind of gift that only comes to filmmakers willing to work in conditions that resist control, and it is, in many ways, the perfect emblem of de Maistre’s method: prepare everything, then leave room for the world to surprise you.
Make A Movie, Save A Life
Animals are always co-stars, never extras in any of de Maistre’s movies, and he treats them with dignity and respect. That same ethic extends well beyond the filming itself. After the shoot, all the animals were transferred to La Perle aux Oiseaux, the only wildlife refuge in Morocco, situated near Marrakech, which cares for rescued wildlife across a three-hectare domain. The production also helped fund and build a well on the site, supporting the roughly hundred species currently living there. The fennecs presented a particular challenge: returning them to the wild requires a slow and patient process of deconditioning.
By the time of the film’s release, the refuge’s director, Selim Naït, had made enough progress to consider it genuinely possible. “That makes Prune and me very happy,” de Maistre says. “Seeing that a film can concretely save lives. Our films highlight animal issues, but here it is not theoretical. It is real.” For a filmmaker who has spent a decade arguing that cinema and responsibility, humans and animals, are inseparable, it is exactly the kind of ending a film should have.
L’Enfant du Désert (currently in French only). In cinemas across France, check local listings. 92 mins. PG.
PHOTO CREDITS
- All photos and images courtesy and © 2025 MAI JUIN PRODUCTIONS – STUDIOCANAL – UMEDIA
- Video as credited
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