If there was any doubt about the educational component of television series, the contemplation of Ourika (Prime Video) clears them up: after its seven chapters we will know everything necessary, even more, about the production, trafficking and sale of cannabis, which, certainly, does not enrich the cultural heritage but allows us to better understand what is established.
It is not clear what connection there may be between drug use and the difficulties of survival in a developed society, apart from the alleged pleasure they provide, but the creators of the series, Clément Godart and Elie Yaffa, directed by Chilean Marcela Saïd and Frenchman Julien Despaux, begin the plot with several sequences of the riots in the suburbs of Paris in 2005, incidents that began after the death of two young Muslims escaping from the police and that increased in violence when the protesters were called “scum”, a visionary comment by the then Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy. And it is in this environment that the fictional Jebli family tries to consolidate its empire as cannabis traffickers, overcoming police raids and the inevitable competition with other mafias.
In Ourika There are two main settings: a poor and remote Moroccan village in the Rif and the cosmopolitanism of Paris seen from one of its suburbs. Driss Jebli, the youngest of the two brothers, will have to put aside his desire to study economics to take charge of the family business, cannabis. His older brother is in prison for a raid led by William, a young and ambitious police inspector. They are the two protagonists of a fictional plot about which some interesting real data can be provided: according to the French Office of Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT), there are five million regular cannabis users in the country and its drug market produces an annual turnover estimated at 3.1 billion euros. These are data that explain the struggles between mafias to consolidate, or expand, the territories they control and the corrupting capacity among the most distinguished social strata, and before tearing one’s clothes, in the hypothetical case that they did so, it will have to be assumed that in Spain, and according to a report by the consultancy Cannamonitor, the much-mentioned consumption of hashish generated sales of 2,138 million euros in 2022. Nothing new under the sun.
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