Monthly Archives: November 2018

The Young and the Restless: the Future of Transnational Moroccan Cinema

The TMC project runs to a close in December 2018. We have had three amazing years where we met and interviewed many Moroccan film professionals. Our last big event in 2018 was the Morocco in Motion conference in Edinburgh, during the Africa in Motion film festival, our amazing partners. We had 15 Moroccan film professionals attending the festival and conference, and reports on their presence and contributions will follow. This blog entry focuses on the young filmmakers that were present, in particular documentary activist Nadir Bouhmouch and animator Sofia El Khyari.

Still from the new film by Nadir Bouhmouch (c) Bouhmouch

Next to the established filmmakers we were lucky enough to invite to the conference and festival (such as Nour-Eddine Lakhmari, Hakim Belabbes and Farida Benlyazid), we also found it very important to make sure our project at large has been both inclusive and supportive of young filmmakers and young academics. It is the young filmmakers who need support and attention, as they are challenging the status quo and renewing Moroccan cinema from the inside. What stands out to us is that these young filmmakers are investing in non-mainstream forms and genres leading to very exciting developments in Moroccan cinema.

The project has not only offered the opportunity to two young women filmmakers Mahassine El Hachadi and Saida Janjague to spend a term at the London Film School where they developed ideas and networked with other young filmmakers, we have also from the start of the project admired the work of Nadir Bouhmouch – a young filmmaker activist and independent academic who devotes his life to making films outside of the establishment and in opposition to the dominant politics of the CCM. Nadir has also taken part in both conferences we organised, speaking about women’s roles in cinema in Morocco when we held the conference in Marrakech in December 2016, and about the increasing impact of the spirit of neoliberalism in cinema at the conference in October 2018.

My Makhzen and Me (c) Nadir Bouhmouch

His films, especially My Makhzen and Me (2012) and Timnadin for the Rif (2017) have garnered considerable attention internationally, not just for their quality in terms of visual and aesthetic power, but especially for their statements of protest and solidarity with the Moroccan lower classes: farmers, workers, and poor urbanites. My Makhzen and Me is an activist document of the struggle of the February 20 Youth Movement and a daring, direct critique of the Moroccan Makhzen (a popular term for ‘the State’). Likewise, in Timnadin for the Rif Bouhmouch focuses on protest against the unfair distribution of wealth and the neglect of the lower classes in the desert of southern Morocco, where poetry expresses solidarity with the uprising in the Rif. He told me about his work on his new documentary about the longest protest action in the Sahara Desert: a 6-year struggle by the Amazigh population of Imider against the pollution by a silver mining corporation of their already scarce drinking water. It not only portrays a long process and protest, the film is also a labour of love and passion, with Nadir struggling to finish the film on his low budget and without support from any funding institution within Morocco. But he is being encouraged by interest in his work from abroad.

Nadir Bouhmouch

He and his team are confident the film will be finished soon with the support he receives from friends and his strong determination to get it out. As a research team, we really hope that the exchanges with producers, distributors and festival organisers at the conference and throughout the project have enabled him to speak to and – importantly – be heard by those with power and money, so that he can successfully change the future of documentary and freedom of speech in Moroccan cinema. He said he hopes he gets more such opportunities to speak up, and found the platform of the project ‘necessary, and even urgent.’

The Transnational Moroccan Cinema project has been funded by the AHRC, and their funding has enabled us to do lots of events over the three years. We have held big conferences, smaller workshops, film screenings, film festival panels, and have been able to visit a large number of Morocco-based festivals in order to discover more about the Moroccan film scene. At one of these festivals, FICAM in Meknès, I had the pleasure to meet Sofia El Khyari and see her first film Ayam. It is only three minutes long but very powerful – as it deals with the love between generations of women over the course of a short tea ceremony.

The Porous Body (c) Sofia El Khyari

Sofia was educated in France and in the UK, and has had some success on the festival circuit with Ayam, winning prizes not only in Morocco but also in France and further afield. She recently finished her graduation film for her Master’s degree at the Royal College of Arts in London. The stunning The Porous Body (2018) explores the outer limits of the body, searching for the space where the skin touches its surroundings and the level of porousness of skin, while also exploring the power of water and the sea as a symbol for womanhood and the subconscious. The film artistically and experimentally deals with space, place and belonging, and with girlhood simultaneously developing into, embracing and rejecting womanhood. The technique of animated watercolour and using watery colours when depicting events and figures outside of the water, interspersed with live-action in filming scenes under water, challenges our ideas of perception and representation. Sofia describes the film as a poetic meditation, and it certainly makes the viewer think and the skin tingle as it increases an awareness of the outer layers of the human skin.

Sofia El Khyari

Sofia told me she was excited to be part of the project and happy that she was invited to screen Ayam at Africa in Motion and speak at the conference, alongside Farida Benlyazid and Lamia Chraibi. The panel she was on at the conference discussed the status of women in Morocco and in the film business at large, and was chaired by our very own fearless woman, Flo. Sofia’s contributions as a young, strong and experimental filmmaker were central to the realistic vision of the future of women in Moroccan cinema, and she told me she felt like she was part of something that increasingly interests her. Being transnational in her education, her knowledge and experience of Moroccan cinema was limited, but meeting inspiring women like Lamia and Farida has ignited her exploration of the Moroccan film world.

The project that we have run over the past three years has seen us meet the big names in Moroccan cinema and those well-established, both historically and contemporarily. But for me, what has stood out and what has really excited me is the energy of the non-mainstream film festivals, and especially the strength and the vibrancy of the young filmmakers and academics I met. I cannot wait to see Nadir Bouhmouch’s new film and explore more of Moroccan animation – especially young women’s roles – such as Sofia El Khyari’s, in the future of animation.

Stefanie Van de Peer

Women in Moroccan Cinema: Panel with Farida Benlyazid, Lamia Chraibi and Sofia El Khyari

On Sunday 28 October 2018, as the midday sun was starting to dispel the morning fog and entering the tall windows of our conference room, we convened a meeting of formidable Moroccan women: Farida Benlyazid, filmmaker who also was the first woman producer in Morocco (when she produced Jillali Ferhati’s A Breech in the wall, 1977); Lamia Chraibi, producer extraordinaire of, among other transnational films, Narjis Nejjar’s Stateless (2018), Hicham Lasri’s Jahilya (2017), Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas (2016); and Sofia El Khyari, whose short animation Ayam (2017) has won many international awards and was screened on Tuesday 30 November as part of the Africa in Motion film festival in Scotland.

Lamia Charibi, Farida Benlyazid, Sofia El Khyari

The speakers had different takes on the complex question of Moroccan women’s cinema, its history, its situation today (we noted a sharp increase in the number of women filmmakers since the late 1990s), and how complicated it was to enter and find one’s place as a woman in the world of cinema in Morocco. Farida Benlyazid reminded her audience, however, that Moroccan cinema has had female participants from the start[1], as illustrated by the presence of two of them at the very first national film festival in Morocco: Farida Bourquia as director and Farida Benlyazid as producer.

Lamia Chraibi first credited les grands (great filmmakers) – in particular Narjis Nejjar – for her ability to gradually find her “place” in the Moroccan world of cinema, as she created her own niche in transnational film production. Then she described her work as a woman producer in Morocco not so much as a challenge as an achievement, to be reached through lots of hard work, of course, but also through will power accompanied by a unique sense of exhilaration when working on beautiful, worthwhile projects.

Sofia El Khyari identified a similar irrepressible drive to work in cinema that propelled her forward with such urgency that it helped her convince herself as well as her family that animation, her true calling, was the only career she could possibly embrace. The three women agreed that the minuscule number of women in key positions in the institutions of Moroccan cinema found a variety of explanations, and that upward mobility in the sector was only possible for women from the upper classes, who were educated and usually had studied abroad, even if, of course, there were notable exceptions to this unspoken rule.

Once the background picture of women in cinema had thus been laid out, the round table welcomed a lively dialogue with the audience, replete with shared questions and comments from practitioners of cinema in Morocco and elsewhere (e.g. Nadir Bouhmouch or Hakim Belabbes, as well as Lidia Peralta), Moroccan academics and critics (e.g. Rachid Naïm or Hamid Aïdouni), postgraduate students (e.g. Lamyâa Achary or Amine Belabbes). The status of women in Morocco’s contemporary society was discussed as well as the sharp divides that exist amongst women as to how they reacted to the reform of the personal code – the mudawwana – in 2004: some of them demonstrated against it, seeing it as erring away from the message of the Quran, while others applauded the rights it conferred on women.

The immense divide between the (remote) rural areas and the urban centers was also evoked as one of the primary factors that slowed down the awareness of young girls. Of particular interest were the exchanges on integrated misogyny on the one hand and on the various interpretations and consequences of the #MeToo movement in Morocco, on the other. Again, issues around education broadly construed were used to explain the low percentage of women able to produce films, and the small number of women occupying decision-making positions in the institutions of cinema, who could affect the present and future of Moroccan cinema. In particular, participants lamented not only the lack of schooling that accounts for the high rate of illiteracy among girls and women in the kingdom, but also the role-models offered by mothers who raise their daughters at home to serve their fathers and brothers; what little girls see on TV; what women see in Moroccan films. In the end, Lamia Chraibi asked: “what do we[filmmakers and producers] give the audience to see?”

The discussion thus laid bare a variety of paradoxes such as: filmmakers need to make films that will reach (entertain?) their audience while also playing a more proactive, political part in raising consciousness in Moroccan women and men; if the hitherto red lines of class and gender seem to be slightly blurrier and able to be transgressed by young determined young women, the structure of the cinema-making apparatus has not moved an inch; a prerequisite for women to enter the world of Moroccan cinema still seems to entail leaving Morocco to study and/or gain experience abroad.

Perhaps what was most heartwarming in this roundtable was the openness of the dialogue and the quality of the listening by every participant to their interlocutors. The conversation went on informally over lunch afterwards, as little clusters formed, shared stories and laughed.

[1]In that early postcolonial Moroccan cinema is not unlike early French cinema (e.g. Alice Guy-Blaché was a filmmaker from 1896 on; Germaine Dulac who wrote about film at the turn of the century, directed her first one in 1915…).

Flo Martin