Tag Archives: Moroccan Cinema

International Film Festival in Marrakech, December 2015

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The 15th edition of the International Festival in Marrakech was rich in tributes to international stars (US Bill Murray, Bollywood star Madhuri Dixit, Korean director Park Chan-Wook, actor Willem Dafoe, as well as Moroccan director of photography Kamal Derkaoui) and to Canadian cinema. With a wide choice of films from India to Mexico, from Kazakhstan to the Ivory Coast, the festival showcased a wide international array of films, with the screening – off competition – of only six long features out of eighty-five from Morocco (and a seventh, Black, by Moroccan directors Adil El Arbi and Billal Fallah, funded by Belgium).Marrakech 13

Two among the latter were greeted with thunderous applause: La Isla (Ahmed Boulane, Morocco and Spain, 2015) and La Marche verte (Youssef Britel, Morocco, 2015). The former’s narrative, a comic spin on Robinson Crusoe in today’s Mediterranean, features a famous comedian in Morocco, Abdellah Ferkous, whose mere appearance on screen triggered an enthusiastic welcome from the audience. Based on the 2002 territorial dispute over the tiny island of Perejil, this comedy tells two tales: the first one focuses on an ordinary policeman, Ibrahim, sent on a mission to monitor the moves of migrants from Africa on a tiny desert island in the Mediterranean near Tangier. One day, Ibrahim finds African migrant Mamadou (Issa N’Diaye) just as Robinson his Friday. The second one is the story of a brewing international conflict. As soon as Ibrahim hoists his Moroccan flag (to the enthusiastic applause of the audience in the Palais des Congrès in Marrakech), the Spanish Bureau, even the American one, start fretting about what they see as an abrupt take-over of the island by Morocco.

The second film, La Marche verte, relates Hassan II’s historic call to the Moroccan people on October 16 1975 to “reclaim the provinces of the South” (aka Western Sahara). It then follows the 350,000 volunteers who boarded trucks in all the provinces of Morocco, headed south and crossed the border into a territory controlled at the time by Spain. The only army shown on screen is the Spanish troops who, upon seeing civilians (especially women and children), do not shoot. The film shows no real visible presence of the Moroccan Royal Armed Forces and suggests that the Green March was completely peaceful. Here again, many in the Palais des Congrès applauded with gusto, as they watched the massive crowd walk across the Southern border, the flag of the kingdom flying high.

Red carpet at Marrakech 2015, with audience (c) Justine Atkinson
Red carpet at Marrakech 2015, with audience (c) Justine Atkinson

The wild clapping and cheering from certain sections of the audience thus welcomed a similar message delivered along two distinct modes (a popular comedy vs. a national epic): in these times of uncertainty, the Kingdom’s vigilance continues to protect its borders against all outside threats.

Florence Martin

Karyan Bollywood (Yassine Fennane, Morocco, 2015)

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Karyan Bollywood is Yassine Fennane’s first feature film, after several shorts (Petite blessure / Tiny wound, 2002; Danger man, The Future Is Now, Chemise blanche, cravate noire, and Trust fighter, 2004) and three films for TV for the Film Industry/Made in Morocco project under Nabil Ayouch as well as a series, Une Heure en enfer, co-authored with Eli El Mejboud for the Al Aoula channel in Morocco. The film received the Prix de la première oeuvre (First film award) at the 2015 National Film Festival in Tangiers.

Poster Karyan Bollywood
Poster Karyan Bollywood

At first, Karyan Bollywood can be seen as a filmic illustration of Salman Rushdie’s “chutnification”: his flavorful image to describe a post-colonial cultural state of hybridity would thus be transposed to a Moroccan film. Casablanca’s discontents and dreams = Mumbai’s. The narrative circles around a Bollywood classic, in both form and content, the dream of the singing and dancing hero forever paralleled and contrasted with the rank reality of the slums outside Casablanca.

The protagonist is obsessed with the 1982 film Disco Dancer (by Babbar Subhash, India) that his now deceased projectionist father showed him when he was a kid, a film that, his father said, contains the answers to all questions. Jimmy adopts the name and dress of its hero, his bedroom is an altar to Bollywood and disco, he lives in a state of arrested development that starts and stops with Disco Dancer. Of course, he is in love with Mouna, the dream girl who lives on the other side of the tracks, and whose bourgeois demeanor rubs up his pal, Houda, the wrong way. In order to get to her, the dazzled thirty-year old dreamer decides to shoot a remake of Dirty Dancer with a “borrowed” IPhone, in the slums. The destruction of the latter is imminent, under the harsh command of a cruel villain: Barkour (who turns out to be Houda’s father, the exact opposite of Jimmy’s father: he is alive, and abandoned Houda and his mother while Jimmy’s father, like a benevolent ancestor, may be dead but still haunts his son in a caring fashion).

The film is a mix of comedy and fantasy (the viewer is presented with Jimmy’s dreamscape at all times), a comedy and a satirical comment on the “people at the margins” as Yassine Fennane is fond of saying, caught between abject poverty and the destruction of home. Change is not easy: neither for Jimmy who has to grow up, nor for the slum dwellers afraid of an even greater economic hardship if they move out. Similarly, cinema may help (Jimmy’s father, the projectionist, finds meaning in film; the slum dwellers finally see themselves on screen at the end of the film) but ultimately does not (it repeats a dreamscape in a loop without changing a thing). The homage to Bollywood (Indian films have been shown forever in Morocco), like a distorting mirror, provides a sliver of escape before it turns back to not even neo-realism but hyper-realism in its depiction of the Casablanca outcasts.

Florence Martin

Moroccan cinema in Berlin

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There was a double presence for Moroccan cinema in Berlin this February for the 66th Berlinale at both the festival and European Film Market (the market for industry professionals linked to the festival).

Moroccan cinema in BerlinIn the film festival itself, Casablancan director Hicham Lasri had his new feature film, Starve your dog selected for the Panorama section of the Berlinale (the section of the festival with a particular interest in promoting auteur cinema or discovering new talent). Lasri has achieved the notable feat of being selected for the Berlinale two years in a row – having made his mark on the festival last year with The Sea is Behind (2014). Starve your dog had already premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015 and is the second part of Lasri’s self-styled ‘dog’ trilogy of films that began with C’est eux les chiens in 2013. The film continues Lasri’s preference for formal abstraction and cinematic experimentation (with both sound and image) as a means of exploring contemporary socio-political realities in Morocco, and was well received by critics at both Toronto and Berlin. Stephen Dalton described the film as both ‘an emphatically surreal oddity pitched at ultra-niche arthouse and festival crowds’ and ‘part of a growing body of films addressing the aftermath of the Arab Spring in an arty, non-naturalistic manner’.

The film’s fragmented, episodic narrative is loosely based around an interview that is waiting to take place between a Moroccan journalist and Driss Basri, the former, feared Minister of the Interior under Hassan II during the so-called Years of Lead. In reality, Basri died in 2007 – having been exiled to France in 1999 when Mohammed VI ascended to the throne – though, for the purposes of his film, Lasri has Basri returning from house arrest (and ready to expose the secrets of his past from the regime of Hassan II to the expectant journalist). Unfortunately, I was unable to see Starve your Dog during my brief visit to this year’s Berlinale – infuriatingly, the film was screened the day before my arrival and then on the final Friday of the festival, by which time I had already returned to the UK. I hope to see this important film very soon. In the meantime, see these reviews from the Hollywood Reporter and the Middle East Institute, as well as this interview with the director by editor-in-chief of Africultures, Olivier Barlet, at the Festival des Cinémas d’Afrique du Pays d’Apt in 2015 for more on Starve your dog and its director.

The second cinematic présence marocaine in Berlin this February was to be found at the European Film Market. The EFM, one of the most important events in the international industry calendar for sales agents, distributors, producers and national film councils, runs concurrently with the film festival. Whilst the festival itself is very much open to the public (throughout the Berlinale, you can see long queues of cinephiles queuing for the chance to buy a ticket to see one of the 400 or so films that are screened in the various sections of the festival), the EFM is quite distinct: a space for industry professionals. Situated in two main locations near Potsdamer Platz, the market is made of a mixture of private companies and national/transnational film commissions and agencies who are there to make deals, buy and sell the rights to films and – in the case of the national film councils – promote their national cinema. This year, as announced six months before, the CCM took the decision to pay for an individual stand at the EFM – principally to promote the 20% rebate offered to foreign films that are partially or completely shot in Morocco. This kind of tax credit or tax incentive has emerged as a common strategy amongst certain national cinemas (e.g. Canada and Spain) and even in individual regions or states (most notably in the US) as a means to incentivise foreign productions to a shoot in the country. The pay-off comes in relation to the investment and associated spend made by the production companies on both film industry technicians and resources (studio space, equipment hire) as well as the money that should (in theory) flow into the local economy during the shoot. For the Director of the CCM, Sarim Fassi Fihri, in post since late 2014, the 20% rebate (passed by the Moroccan government in December 2015), alongside new tax schemes aimed at supporting the domestic exhibition centre, forms a key part of his plans for developing the Moroccan film industry [see Sarim Fassi Fihri’s interview with Martin Dale in Variety, December 2015].

Morocco has a long and highly successful tradition of attracting foreign film production to shoot in the kingdom – from Orson Welles’ cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello (1952) to modern epics such as Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000) and blockbuster comedies such as Asterix & Obélix: mission Cleopatre (Chabat, 2002). The presence of representatives from CLA Studios and Atlas Corporation Studios at the Moroccan stand, working alongside the CCM in Berlin, was evidence of how important this policy clearly is to promoting investment in the Moroccan film industry of the 21st century. What remains to be seen is if such investment in the more commercial end of the Moroccan film industry can also have a positive effect on the sustained development of all areas of the national cinema culture and Moroccan film art – including the films of Moroccan directors such as Hicham Lasri, working on more experimental, auteur-led independent productions.

Will Higbee

Hello world!

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Welcome to the Transnational Moroccan Cinema blog. The researchers on the project will regularly post materials, interviews, reflections and results of archival research here. If you would like to contribute a guest-blog, please get in touch with the project’s research assistant, Dr Stefanie Van de Peer – S.E.Van-De-Peer@exeter.ac.uk, and we’d be very happy to consider your work for inclusion.