Casablanca Beats (2021) is a feature film masquerading as a documentary. A group of kids from a poor Moroccan suburb play themselves as they flock to a local culture centre, Les Étoiles de Sidi Moumen, where they’re learning to rap. Watching over them is Anas — also playing himself — a stern yet passionate rapper. He’s the kind of teacher whose fierce thirst for freedom and uncompromising belief in his students seems to carry more voltage than his surroundings can safely handle.

The story begins with Anas living on the street, a stray dog his only companion, until he’s offered a job at Les Étoiles. It ends with a long-awaited concert that finally lets the students speak their minds — and, inevitably, provokes outrage in the conservative Muslim community that surrounds the centre.

Anas is cast back onto the street he came from. Yet before he leaves, he witnesses his disciples finding their voices. He walks away, one feels, knowing that his legacy will live on.

The plot is plain enough, and neither the acting nor the cinematography is particularly elaborate. Still, something about it lingers.

A few days later, I realise what it is: there’s something archetypal about Anas’s trajectory. He loses his job not because he fails, but because he cares too much. In that, he joins a curious lineage — real and imagined alike — of souls exiled for their conviction: Steve Jobs cast out of Apple, and John Keating dismissed from Welton Academy in Dead Poets Society. Both, like Anas, fall victim to their own intensity. They can’t leave well enough alone.

I once read — I’ve long forgotten where — that priests must be moderate believers; if they ever truly caught fire with the Holy Ghost, they’d be exiled from their own churches.

Perhaps that’s the pattern I glimpse here: that the world draws power from what it cannot bear.