Tag Archives: Morocco

Morocco Animated: the International Festival of Animated Film in Meknès

 

After an exciting week in the mythic city of Tangier for the Moroccan National film festival, I went to Meknès for another festival, one with international ambitions: FICAM, or the International Festival of Animation in Meknès. The festival runs over 5 days and is held at the Institut Français in the new town, while we were staying in a riad in the old town. The walk to the festival is steeply uphill, and so we usually arrived at the film screenings very ready for a refreshing mint tea and a film.

FICAM was launched in 2000 and focuses on animations from the international circuit. Mohammed Beyoud, FICAM’s creative director, inaugurated the festival with an eye on the promotion of the art of animation, through both animated film screenings and educational workshops. Beyoud invites animators and filmmakers from both commercial and independent backgrounds to showcase their work and provide, as speakers, valuable knowledge on a range of animation practices. It is a very open-minded festival, with a focus on students’ experiences and development. This is perhaps most obvious in the workshops and conferences that take place every day in the médiathèque: the festival’s organisers and the speakers gear their introductions and talks to the students, and constitute an inherently encouraging, if somewhat intense, part of the fest.

FICAM’s focus on women in animation

This year, FICAM’s focus was on women in animation, its trailer showcasing female figures from all over the world, including Arab, African, Japanese and European women in animation. Indeed, the banners stated assertively: “L’Afrique s’exprime” and “L’Occident est au rendez-vous”. The main guest of the festival was Brenda Chapman, best known for her directorial work on Brave (2012), The Prince of Egypt (1998) and The Lion King (1994). Chapman gave the festival’s lecture on its first day, focusing on her own and other women’s contributions to American animation. Other guests were Carlos Saldanha and Sunao Katabuchi and one particularly interesting talk was about the depiction of the Arab in American animation, delivered by Rachid Naim from the University of Safi.

Aïcha’s dancing helpers

The festival is funded by the Aïcha Foundation and the French Institute, and it receives institutional support from CCM, TV5Monde and 2M. CCM does not pay enough attention to animation, and that can only change for the better if FICAM and its visitors keep their precious work going. As Meknès is the heart of the agricultural region in Morocco, and Aïcha, as the largest concern in the canning industry, is an appropriate local funder. It was founded in the 1920s, and connects the local agricultural industry to the wellbeing of its future consumers. The mascot, a young girl, has transformed over the years into an animated advertising tool with characteristics of Snow White, as she looks and acts completely innocent, has seven companions who work hard and have distinct, individual personality traits. They all adore and protect Aïcha. (To see an example of how Aicha is animated for TV advertising, see here). The brand has grown to such an extent that as soon as Aïcha appears on screen at FICAM the young audiences go mad with enthusiasm and start clapping and singing along loudly to the tunes. The seven companions were outside in the courtyard of the French Institute, waiting for us to come out of the films and entertain all of us, but mostly the youngest kids who laughed, danced and played with them in between screenings. Animated advertising is therefore recognised as having an enormous influence on the industry of animated film at the festival, while the brand also supports and recognises the importance of the festival and its international reach.

This year, FICAM had 6 feature films in competition: Mutafukaz by Guillaume Renard and Shojiro Nishimi (France/Japan, 2017); Minga and the Borken Spoon by Claye Edou (Cameroon, 2017); In this Corner of the World by Sunao Katabuchi (Japan, 2017); Nelly and Simon: Mission Yéti by Nancy Florence Savard and Pierre Graco (Canada, 2017); A Silent Voice by Naoko Yamada (Japan, 2017); and Un Homme est mort by Olivier Cossu (France, 2018). These six films were all shown in the presence of their directors, with a short intro and an extensive Q&A after the screenings. All of the directors were either very pleasantly surprised by the attention they received in screening rooms filled with children and young people, or they commented on how much they loved FICAM and how excited they were to be there again, among the children, to speak to them and engage with the students. FICAM clearly focuses on the audience and on the education of the next generation of animation lovers and animation artists.

Out of competition the festival screened 1917 – The Real October by Katrin Rothe (Germany/Switzerland, 2017); Zombillenium by Arthur de Pins and Alexis Ducord (France, 2017); Iqbal, l’enfant qui n’avait pas peur by Michel Fuzellier and Babak Payami (France/Italy, 2016); Coco by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina (USA, 2017); The Jungle Bunch by David Alaux (France, 2017); Ferdinand by Carlos Saldanha (2017) and Drôles de petites bêtes by Arnaud Bouron and Antoon Krings (2017).

FICAM at the French Institute in Meknès

There was a special focus on Japanese anime, with classics such as Momorato by Mitsuyo Seo (1945); Arrietty by Sunao Katabuchi (2001); as well as newer materials such as Lou over the Wall (2017); The Napping Princess by Kenji Kamiyama (2017) and Mazinger Z by Junji Shimizu (2017).

The short film competition likewise was incredibly rich, with films from all over the world, and ran over four days, screening five to six films every evening at 9pm. This wide variety was matched by the array of professionals, students and fans at some of the many talks, discussions, roundtables and ‘thé à la menthe’ moments in the café of the Institut Français. In the coming blog entries, I will reflect a little bit more on each of these aspects of FICAM, and on the winners of the competitions.

Stefanie Van de Peer

The African road movies of Khouribga

 

The films of the Khouribga International African Film Festival were diverse across nations, cultures, languages, themes, aesthetics, production models… Yet out of 14 films in competition, 3 were clear “African road-movies” – Frontières by Apolline Traoré (Burkina-Faso, 2017), The Train of Salt and Sugar by Licinio Avezedo (Mozambique , 2016) and Hayat by Raouf Sebbahi (Morocco, 2016) – taking the viewers across changing landscapes as they follow the challenging journeys of the protagonists. What is novel here is that the road movie no longer shows the journey of a single protagonist or two trying to either find or lose themselves, but of an entire community sharing one mode of transportation, each group with its own dynamics and finding a form of solidarity by the end of the film.

Hayat

The three films offer three distinct variations on the road movie genre, and feature different modes of public transportation on the African continent (obviously a train in The Train of Salt and Sugar; a bus in Hayat (Life); a string of buses in Frontiers). Each long journey allows for a binary shot/counter shot visual structure providing an intimate look into individual character development on the bus or train as well as sweeping vistas of the outside landscapes and/or nations traversed. The human dimension of each character (framed by inside/outside shots, individual and collective positions, the familiar and the alien, the infinitely small and the infinitely large) is thus constantly highlighted in its progress.

Sebbahi’s use of the bus in Hayat has a whiff of Georges Pérec’s use of the fictitious Parisian building in his novel La Vie mode d’emploi (1978), showing diverse lives parallel to one another, at times bumping into each other in one locus. Yet, the bus moves across the country, and so do its individual characters, from one spatial (at times ethical) initial position to a modified one in the end. Hence, the hypocritical religious character is unmasked for who he really is; a woman becomes a mother on the side of the road; the bus driver becomes a little more patient… here, it is not so much national unity that is stressed as national diversity: every single traveler makes a piece of Moroccan society’s variegated jig-saw puzzle, and everyone moves towards a better comprehension – or at least tolerance – of the other. The film is funny and moving in turn and has an easy-going rhythm. The tone of its well-written script is closer to that of an intimate comedy than to the epic narrative of The Train of Sugar and Salt.

Train of Salt and Sugar

The Train of Salt and Sugar, a beautifully filmed and solidly structured film adapted from a novel published by its director, received awards (best scenario and best director) for its gripping tale of a train traversing Mozambique to Malawi in 1989, during the civil war. Its passengers are ordinary men and women on the one hand, trying to continue to eke out a living trading salt for other goods across the border (sugar is especially precious), and soldiers guarding them on the other, as the guerilla enemy, lurking off screen, repeatedly attacks the convoy. On the train, various individual narratives develop and female characters share at least the same amount of screen as male characters. The army does not appear monochromatic: e.g., a tragic romance develops between an officer and a young freshly graduated nurse; an old hero of mythical proportions knows how to defeat his enemy thanks to his experience and spiritual connection to the jungle the group passes through; another one, the dreaded commandant, abuses the power granted by his rank and rapes women. The train chugs along, stops short of mines and other booby-traps set by the barbarian enemy “out there”. Classically written, it is a polished, historical road-movie that highlights the metaphoric passage from the ugliness of armed conflict to the hope for the future of a reconciled nation, and perhaps, beyond Mozambique, of the entire region. In the end, then, just as in Hayat, individuals grow and become stronger characters. However, the most spectacular transformation is that of the entire community: the army and its citizens now form one group, and the final fixed camera large-angle shot gives a glimpse of both individual and collective future: on the left side of the screen, the female protagonist, Rosa the healing nurse, walks away from the camera towards her future, while on a right parallel track, the train rolls away towards the horizon of a peaceful Mozambique.

Frontières

Frontiers by Apolline Traoré, is the film I wish to linger on. This narrative has all the ingredients of an innovative, nourishing film – and, although I was glad it received a prize for the best female second role for the splendid acting of beautiful Naky Sy Savané (revealed in the West for her performance in Fanta Regina Nacro’s La Nuit de la vérité, 2004), I was bitterly disappointed it did not get a prize for best film.

Directed by a formidable woman who also wrote (and rewrote) the script, this film was born from the realization that many women whom you can see on markets in West Africa go to amazing lengths to secure their wares. They traverse borders, bringing bazin material, for instance (hence the hilarious scene of Naky Sy Savané smuggling all of it under an enormous robe, literally doubling in size in the process, prior to crossing the border), and trading for other goods which they bring back to sell on the market at home. The journey is long (it takes weeks on end) and perilous: the soldiers at the borders are corrupt and demand money or sex, and there is no one to defend the women.

Apolline Traoré wanted to make sure these sellers knew their rights in the age of free circulation of goods and people in West Africa. The bureaucrats (the police, the army, the customs officers, all of them male…) take advantage of illiterate women. Traoré uses film here as an education tool to empower these brave women who cross all sorts of frontiers: national, cultural, traditional, gendered and more.

Apolline Traoré

In the meantime, Traoré educates her viewers beyond the market women she wishes to address in the first row, with subtlety and great verve. Her narrative is funny, touching, and each individual character brings a lot to the understanding of the range of travelers (in age, condition, national origin, humanity) and destinies at stake on the bus. The film slices through class and gender with a wonderful economy of images and dialogues: Traoré’s rhythm is steady, her camerawork beautiful, her script rings very true. Her variation on the road movie offers an original perspective on evolving individual characters as well as on a beautifully imaged, intensely moving, pan-African, female solidarity across borders. Traoré got my prize!

Florence Martin

A Festival Goes to Jail…. Khouribga (September 2017)

 

This year marked the 20th edition of the African Cinema Festival in Khourigba (9-16 Sept 2017), which was created in the Spring of 1977 by the Federation of Cine-Clubs in Morocco, and largely supported by the OCP (Organisation Chérifienne des Phosphates) – to be expected in the capital of phosphates. Khouribga, a city two hours away from Casablanca, is off the beaten track, with an economy completely driven by the OCP, as attested by an exhibit of photographs next to the Cultural Center where the films are screened.

Khouribga – Poster 2017 (c) Florence Martin

Presided over by Nour Eddine Saïl, this festival welcomes films from all over the African continent. In his editorial introduction to the richly illustrated festival catalogue, Saïl reminds us that the festival was founded in coordination with the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine, and was the result of “the serene encounter between the intense absorbing power of Khouribga and the intense emissive power of the still very young African Cinema at that time.”

The range of countries represented by the films in competition is impressive: Algeria, Benin, Burkina-Faso, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, Mozambique, Rwanda (also the honored cinema of the festival), Senegal, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda…

And yet the fate of African cinema is still precarious, as Saïl soberly reminds us in the same introduction, comparing it at times to the rock, painfully, endlessly pushed up the hill by Sisyphus:

“On a continental scale, the quantity of films produced each year is rather insignificant, as is the case when it comes to the number of cinemas and screens. The same applies to public policies regarding our national film industries: policies that lack overall vision, continuity, and real determination; all served with cheerfully irresponsible verbosity.”

This year, the festival also organized a colloquium centered on “immigration and cultural integration” and the image of the Sub-Saharan migrant. The organisers of the colloquium partnered up with the Délégation Générale de l’Administration Pénitentiaire et de la Réinsertion and took the festival delegation to the prison of Khouribga for two consecutive days, sharing two film screenings and discussions (Horizon Beautiful, Stefan Jäger, Ethiopia, 2013, and A Mile in My Shoes, Saïd Khallaf, Morocco, 2016). The prisoners (men and women) in attendance were mostly Sub-Saharan migrants who had been brought in from various prisons throughout the Kingdom. One of the most moving pleas during the discussion came from an eloquent young man who asked of the film people he was facing that they use the media to help change (Moroccan) stereotypes on Sub-Saharan African migrants (e.g. that they are empty-headed victims fleeing war-torn countries) and to help construct and broadcast representations of the migrant population closer to reality: educated individuals trying to make a better, dignified living.

Florence Martin

International Film Festival in Marrakech, December 2015

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)

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