On May 16th, 2003, 12 young men set off suicide bombs at five sites, including restaurants and Jewish institutions, in the center of Casablanca, Morocco, killing 33 civilians. When French-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch learned they were all from the same shantytown of Sidi Moumen, seen here in spectacular overviews of what he has called “an open sky jail,” he realized they were growing up there in the 1990’s while he had made films about its poverty and violence. Inspired by Mahi Binebine’s novel (published in English under the film’s title), he went back to explore step-by-step their lives to see what he—and the rest of his country—had missed.

Ayouch casts local boys for his very authentic cast (as he has done previously) to play a gang of street urchins who love playing raucous soccer. Small Yachine worships international stars with his best friends Nabil and Fouad. When fights break out, his older brother Hamid is his defender. By the time he’s 10, Yachine also wants to impress Fouad’s sister, Ghiziane, and Hamid threatens those who disagree with Yachine’s disputed soccer moves with a fierce whip of chains.

The boys’ hair-trigger tempers are already a survival strategy as they roam the surrounding garbage dumps, picking through it for anything to sell—one of the few ways to earn money for the family’s necessities. Any other entrepreneurship attracts thieves. For the brothers, the dangers in the neighborhood have left their father broken, another brother brain-damaged, and their doting mother helpless to do much more than watch soap operas.

With the years going by marked on screen, Hamid (Abdedlilah Rachid) is still an aggressive soccer hooligan, but also a drug dealer, paying off, and even attacking, corrupt cops. He’s arrested anyway, leaving teenage Yachine (Abdelhakim Rachid), Nabil (Hamza Souidek) and Fouad (Ahmed El Idrissi El Amrani) to bond tighter in a dysfunctional, sex-segregated society full of homosexual slurs and perceived and real threats to their masculinity. (The novel features more male rape.)

By the time the community gathers around television sets to cheer the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (with shouts of “They got them!”), Hamid has come back from jail as a committed Muslim, leaving his mother torn between pride and discomfort at his rigid requirements. Pushing the other boys to stop sniffing glue, he finds Yachine a job as a mechanic at a garage, and supports and aids him when Yachine strikes out in a rage against his garage-owner employer.

Hamid insists that his brother pay back for his support by joining with his new religious friends. This is not a quick or simple conversion to the militant cause. Like exchanging one team for another, the four younger friends are first attracted by the bearded leader’s martial arts classes. Gradually they find structure, discipline, virility, and purpose under this replacement father figure, and are kept more and more separate from their families (despite Yachine still dreaming of Ghiziane).

The leader drives them to their first adventure out of the Casablanca slums, by the ocean, and then up in the mountains. But this version of a bucolic-looking fresh air camp is actually military training to chants against the Zionist conspiracy, though not all of the recruits are equally convinced. The film’s title comes from a phrase used by jihadists: “Fly, horses of God, and to you the doors of paradise shall open!”

This years-long grooming provides more explanatory social context than the more politically-oriented Palestinian bombers in Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005), let alone Ziad Doueiri’s highly fictional The Attack from last year. The cult-like aspects of this manipulation of Islam seem over-emphasized, let alone the sexual frustrations, but there are also similarities to Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002) in how marginalized kids who feel they have no other option get caught up in organized violence to give them a sense of control over their powerless lives, leaving in their crossfire a high body count, including their own. That Ayouch is first and foremost a storyteller and a compelling filmmaker is why the American release is being sponsored by Jonathan Demme.