Mon Taxi: Meriem Sakrouhi’s Cinematic Love Letter to a Father’s Voice Beyond Loss

Meriem Sakrouhi’s Mon Taxi doesn’t begin with a dramatic inciting incident—it begins the way so many real lives do: with a habit. A daily call. A familiar voice on the other end of the line that turns an ordinary commute into something anchored, witnessed, shared.

The award-winning Moroccan filmmaker—an architect turned director now based in New York—brings her intimate documentary short to audiences this summer following its Tribeca World Premiere. Mon Taxi screens in the Experimental Docs — Short Docs Package at RIFF (Flickers) on August 5th at 2:30pm, and later in the Documentary 1 Program at HollyShorts on August 16th at 5pm. Sakrouhi will be onsite, carrying the film’s tenderness into rooms where strangers will recognize their own private rituals in her story.

At just 8½ minutes, Mon Taxi is small in runtime but expansive in emotional reach—directed, edited, and produced by Sakrouhi herself, with additional cinematography also shaped by her hand. It’s a film that understands grief not as a single moment of devastation, but as something repetitive and living: a rhythm that returns when you least expect it, when your body reaches for what it used to do, when love keeps moving even after loss has rearranged the world.

The premise is simple, and that simplicity is its power: “When the person you call every day disappears, where does your voice go?” For years, Sakrouhi’s father was the invisible driver of her daily life—present through sound, through routine, through the steady intimacy of conversation. He held her wildest dreams, her smallest complaints, her everyday thoughts. Then he passed, and she didn’t just lose his voice—she lost the destination for her own.

And still, the urge to speak remained. One day, she decides to call him.

Mon Taxi unfolds through eleven voice notes recorded over eighteen months, visualizing those calls as Sakrouhi moves through grief, family, and unexpected humor. The film becomes a cinematic love letter to conversations that extend beyond space and time—an intimate document of what happens when silence isn’t what grief leaves behind, but what it refuses to accept.

In her director’s statement, Sakrouhi names something many people feel but rarely articulate: we talk about grief as absence, but sometimes grief is the overwhelming presence of need—the need to share, to report back, to reach out. After moving to the U.S., calling her father became a daily ritual: the moment she stepped outside, she called him. When he died, the instinct didn’t disappear. The thoughts didn’t stop arriving. The reflex to pick up the phone didn’t vanish just because the world had changed.

So she hit record instead.

That choice—quiet, visceral, deeply human—becomes the film’s heartbeat. In those recorded messages, Mon Taxi finds its emotional thesis: life can end, but relationships can continue. The bond doesn’t evaporate; it transforms. It becomes memory, repetition, tenderness. It becomes a new kind of conversation—one that doesn’t require an answer to still be real.

There’s something especially resonant about Mon Taxi in a digitally saturated, often isolating world: we are more connected than ever, and yet so many of us are speaking into voids—texts unanswered, voice notes left hanging, calls we wish we could make. Sakrouhi’s film doesn’t offer a neat resolution, and it doesn’t try to. Instead, it offers recognition. It offers permission. It suggests that sometimes grief isn’t silence at all—it’s love refusing to let the conversation end.

Sakrouhi is no stranger to acclaim. Her directorial debut, Inner Selves, won several awards, and she’s currently developing a feature-length documentary—while also training for her second half marathon, a detail that feels oddly fitting for an artist whose work understands endurance: the long distance of mourning, the miles of memory, the steady forward motion of carrying someone with you.

With Mon Taxi, Meriem Sakrouhi has crafted something intimate and moving—a short documentary that lingers like a voice you can’t quite stop hearing, even after the call is over. It’s a conversation starter, yes. But more than that, it’s a reminder: sometimes the most radical thing we can do after loss is keep speaking.