Monthly Archives: December 2016

TMC Moroccan Cinema Uncut – day 4

8 December 2016Conference, MarrakechStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

The final day of the TMC ‘Transnational Moroccan Cinema Uncut’ symposium began with a panel entitled ‘Film Reception in/of Morocco’ and three complimentary presentations that took a varied approach to the topic, developing existing lines of enquiry in relation to discussion on the previous 3 days. Caroline Eades explored the question of how Moroccan cinema is viewed beyond the nation space and an idea of national cinema constructed in the transnational space of the film festival – taking as a case study two festivals in Washington DC, one a specialist Arab film festival, the other a more general film fest held annually in the city.

Yahya Laayouni, Rachid Naïm and Caroline Eades, with Michael Gott as chair

The second speaker of the morning, Yahya Laayouni, offered delegates an analysis of the current state of film criticism in Morocco. Yahya argued that whilst Moroccan cinema has made significant advances in the past two decades, critical writing in Arabic (crucial for those Moroccans) on Moroccan film remains rare and inconsistent. In order for Moroccan cinema to fully gain the attention it deserves, suggested Yahya, there was a need for more formal spaces (in print and online) for rigorous criticism to emerge in Arabic, as well as for more space to be given to female film critics. There was strong interest in the topic during the discussion that followed, not least due to the presence at the symposium of the esteemed Moroccan film critic and journalist Ahmed Boughaba.

Our final speaker on the panel, Rachid Naïm, returned to the subject of New Urban Cinema (NUC) in Morocco, a term introduced into the critical and scholarly lexicon in 2013 by our very own Jamal Bahmad to describe a popular movement of urban cinema focusing on social issues, produced by a new generation of dynamic Moroccan filmmakers. This recent trend in Moroccan cinema had already been addressed in the context of gender on day one of the symposium by Nadir Bouhmouch. Rachid Naïm chose to come at the topic from a different angle, with an analysis of the NUC in relation to questions of representation and aesthetics, exploring the theoretical possibilities and limitations of analyzing the NUC cinema in the context of postmodernism through close readings of Bensaïdi’s 2007 film WWW What a Wonderful World.

The first panel of this final day of the symposium maintained the energy, rigour and engagement shown by all of our speakers across the four days during the debate and discussion (formal and informal) that delegates, invited guests, industry professionals and members of the public have shared since Sunday in the Amani hotel – a location that has been conducive to free and open exchange of ideas amongst all those who have attended.

Will, Flo, Karim Fassir-Fihri and Ahmed el Maanouni

This sense of a genuine forum for debate about the current state of Moroccan cinema in all its (trans)national formations continued into the final session of the morning: an industry round table brought together by the Chambre Marocaine des Producteurs de Films (CMPF) in association with the TMC research team. We were honoured to welcome Ahmed el Maanouni (director, producer and president of the CMPF) to chair an industry panel, along with fellow members of the CMPF, producers Lamia Chraibi, Jamal Souissi, Khalid Zairi and Zakia Tahiri. The debate was placed in the context of the perceived ‘shock’, as Maanouni put it, of the absence, for the first time in the 16 year history of the festival of any Moroccan films at the Marrakech International Film Festival (with the exception of the Moroccan-Spanish-French-Qatari co-production Mimosas (2016) by Galician director Oliver Laxe), and the comedy Mon Oncle (Aammi, 2016) which was screened as part of the festival’s homage to stage and screen actor Abderrahim Tounsi.

wp_20161207_11_52_50_pro — Ahmed el Maanouni, Khalid Zairi, Zakia Tahiri, Lamia Chraibi and Jamal Souissi

The lack of visibility for Moroccan cinema at this year’s festival, which has already generated huge and passionate debate in the Moroccan press as well as through social media, thus formed a starting point for a wider ranging debate around the challenges at what is increasingly appearing to be a crucial period for the continued development and diversity of Moroccan cinema. The panel members spoke with eloquence and passion about the need to support young talent (especially young producers), for more resources to be devoted to the crucial stage development of films, for a greater need for a genuine reciprocity between Moroccan film and TV, the role of the CCM, as well as a need for the industry to unite and lobby with a collective voice in the face of the forthcoming changes to the legal codes for cinema and audiovisual industries in Morocco.

The passion of the panel was matched by that of interventions from the sizeable audience, who were given ample opportunity to offer their own perspective and proposals in a lively and open debate that ran for over two hours. The round table debate (covered by two Moroccan TV channels) fulfilled precisely the aim of the TMC symposium and the project more generally to provide a genuine forum for debate and exchange between researchers and film professionals. In this context, we were honoured to welcome an array of some of the most respected filmmakers in Moroccan cinema as audience members to the round-table, including Farida Benlyazid, M.A Tazi, Faouzi Bensaïdi and Daoud Aoulad-Syad. Director of the CCM, Sarim Fassi Fihri, was also in attendance and said a few words at the start of the session. The round table marked the first of what we hope will be many collaborations between the TMC research project and the CMPF.

[NB. More detailed blogs will follow in the coming weeks on many of the issues raised in the round table discussion as well as Oliver Laxe’s film Mimosas, one of the hits of the festival]

To bring an end to an exceptional morning and a memorable conference, we were equally honoured to welcome Moroccan film critic and journalist Ahmed Boughaba to present the closing address. M. Boughaba’s experience as both a critic and a key figure in the ciné-club culture in Morocco of the 1960s, allowed the audience a unique insight as to the role of the Moroccan film critic and offered a response to Yahyah Laayouin’s paper from the opening panel of the morning, as well as reflections on the debate on the current state of Moroccan cinema that had taken place in the round-table.

Ahmed Boughaba with translator Rachid Naim

After an exhausting but exhilarating four days, the end of the symposium was marked by a reception and lunch in the tranquil surroundings of the Jardin Majorelle, attended by the academics, critics, filmmakers, industry professionals cinephiles – colleagues and friends, old and new.

The symposium has been a great success and will contribute immensely to the continued research of the TMC research project. The team wishes to thank the AHRC and University of Exeter for its support for the project – without which this symposium could not have taken place. The indomitable Stefanie Van de Peer also deserves a special mention for her tireless efforts, organizational skills and good humour that have successfully guided this symposium through all its various stages.

Thanks also to the Amani hotel for their warm welcome to all delegates and helpful assistance throughout the symposium.

Will Higbee

Day 3 at TMC: Minorities on Moroccan Screens

6 December 2016Conference, Marrakech, Moroccan CinemaStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

The third day of the TMC conference started misty and atmospherically, with limited views outside the windows but all the more insightful views inside the conference room. Bright and early (for some at least), today got underway with a four-speaker panel on sexualities and trauma: we heard from Lowry Martin, Valerie Orlando, Kaya Davies Hayon and Jimia Boutouba.

Lowry started the panel with a queer studies approach to Salvation Army (Abdallah Taïa), which was met with very lively discussions: where is queer studies situated when we talk about Moroccan cinema, or cinema from Morocco that crosses borders (in this case between Morocco and Switzerland)? Do we need to make distinctions between a Muslim Arab world and a Christian Europe? Valerie talked about Mohamed Mouftakir’s film Pegase, a dark psychological thriller about a traumatised young woman who is the victim of her father’s lust for power and goes through life as a boy in order to safeguard his lineage. Her sexuality is denied, and as she undergoes psychiatric treatment it transpires that she is also the victim of pedophilia. The paper sparked questions about deviant sexualities and how film deals with silences and gaps in Morocco’s past. Kaya then looked at The Sleeping Child by Yasmine Kassari, in a phenomenological analysis of women’s bodies and the empowerment of spiritualism. A story about migration, where women are left behind, The Sleeping Child ultimately reveals a transnational feminist aesthetic that returns also in other Maghrebi women’s films. Jimia, lastly, changed the mood in the room as the sun came out, with a discussion of comedy Number One by Zakia Tahiri. The contextualization of the film nevertheless showed that a Moroccan masculinity is experienced as being under threat, and that ultimately this masculinity is a performance. The male protagonist in the film becomes undone, not in the sense that he is un-manned, but he is un-mastered. This comic film has social concerns that are just as urgent and important as the more serious films discussed earlier.

The roundtable on Berber film and film festivals that followed was organized by Lucy McNair and Habiba Boumlik from CUNY, who invited Hamid Aïdouni, Jamal Bahmad, the organisers of the Fameck Arab film festival, and Amazigh filmmaker Ahmed Baidou (known for his film Addour) onto the panel. They discussed issues of programming Amazigh films for festivals and issues of translating cultures as well as languages. Important questions were asked, such as: what is Amazigh cinema, and where is it located? Which language is Amazigh cinema in, and how does it speak to audiences around the world? We learned that one must think of Amazigh culture as a horizontal and as a vertical experience: in the past it reached from the Maghreb to Egypt, and from north of Morocco to its deep south. The most significant and welcome conclusion of this roundtable was that as scholars, filmmakers, producers, and distributors, we must all embrace the diversity within Morocco and within its cinema, and that it is very urgent to do so indeed.

The last panel of the day returned to the theme of women in film, discussing in particular the circulation of films, and their distribution circuits in Morocco, France and the EU at large. Patricia Caillé and Karine Prévoteau showed us their findings of years of research into why some films manage to reach wide audiences and others disappear into forgetfulness, as they get lost in the maze of film, DVD, VHS and TV distribution worldwide. Pertinent questions about online platforms and digital disruption were asked in their discussion. Touria Khannous closed off today by discussing Rock the Casbah (Leila Marrakchi) and The Sleeping Child (Yasmine Kassari), and in particular the difficult if not impossible balance of being an outsider and an insider at the same time. Might that be the ultimate transnational condition?

The highlight at the festival today was the screening of Oliver Lax’s Mimosas: a transnational production between Spain, France, Qatar and Morocco that combines elements of the road movie and the western. There were long queues to get into the cinema, which was filled to capacity. People clearly enjoyed themselves, and the Moroccan audiences may have gotten more out of the film than we did, as with certain scenes in the film, people were laughing at the nickname of the central character (tête de poêle), and we as Western audiences missed some of the jokes. Something got lost in translation, or cultural references were perhaps obscure for us. Such is the experience of a transnational spectator: it makes you wonder, explore and dig deeper…

Notes de Marrakech, deuxième journée

6 December 2016Conference, MarrakechStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

Viola Shafik, Will Higbee, Florence Martin and Kevin Dwyer!

Le temps change vite à Marrakech et le soleil tristement absent hier est revenu ce matin en ce second jour du colloque Le Cinéma du Maroc dans tous ses états : visions locales, dialogues transnationaux. Il a donc accompagné la séance plénière de Viola Shafik sur le cinéma arabe et les hégémonies transnationales (qui aident à le définir tout en le compliquant tout au long de son histoire).

Il a attiré les congressistes sous les parasols de la terrasse pour une pause café ou thé à la menthe bien méritée entre les sessions. Celles-ci furent fascinantes : ce matin, Peter Limbrick a dévidé les rapports du cinéma de Moumen Smihi à une modernité transnationale en mouvance, Ayoub Bouhouhou a démontré comment Hakim Belabbès troublait le(s) genre(s) du documentaire ; enfin Joshua A. Sabih a rendu compte de l’image du Juif marocain dans les documentaires, séries télévisées et cinéma israélien.

Et le soleil ne fut pas le seul à apparaître spontanément aujourd’hui !

Une nuée d’étudiants en cinéma de la Faculté des Arts et des Sciences Humaines de Marrakech est venue se poser à nos côtés, comme de sages oiseaux souriants et attentifs. Puis, sans tambour ni trompette, Farida Benlyazid est arrivée, accompagnée de Mohamed Abderrahmane Tazi nous honorer de leur présence. Ces deux visites ont changé l’ambiance du colloque : nous avions soudain l’impression d’avoir un vrai « chez nous marrakchi », un lieu chaleureux où deux invités de marque du cinéma marocain et une troupe de jeunes curieux passent en voisins ou en amis qui décideraient de passer prendre un café et voir ce qui se passe chez nous. Les discussions fusaient et dans la salle du colloque et sur la terrasse. Un beau moment.

Deux films en compétition vus cet après-midi et ce soir au festival : Tombé du ciel / Min assamah (Wissam Charaf, France et Liban, 2016) et Parting (Navid Mahmoudi, Iran et Afghanistan, 2016). Le premier un montage d’humour et de surréel sur une constante de violence made in Beyrouth ; le second l’émouvant récit d’un couple de réfugiés vu depuis Téhéran et Istanbul.

Demain, on prévoit à nouveau du soleil, des cinéastes, et puis aussi des directeurs de festival, et on attend tous de voir Mimosas (Oliver Laxe, 2016, Espagne, Maroc, France, Qatar) avec impatience.

Florence Martin

Moroccan Cinema Uncut Conference: Day 1

4 December 2016Conference, Marrakech, TransnationalStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

TMC’s first international conference “Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Local Perspectives, Transnational Dialogues” (Marrakech, 4-7 December 2016) kicked off with warm words of welcome by Principal Investigator Will Higbee (University of Exeter) and Co-investigator Florence Martin (Goucher College). They welcomed all the delegates, who have travelled from different parts of the world to give papers, keynote addresses and attend the Marrakech International Film Festival (2-10 December). Will also thanked the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for making this conference and project possible in the first place. The Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) and its director Sarim Fassi-Fihri were also thanked for their help.

The conference kicked off with a keynote address by Kevin Dwyer, an established anthropologist and specialist of Moroccan cinema and Maghrebi media cultures. Dwyer surveyed the landscape of documentary production in Morocco and Tunisia. He started by revealing his own personal and scholarly journey as an anthropologist of rural Morocco and human rights activism. This trajectory has led him to work on Moroccan cinema over the last twenty years. After a discussion of key questions around the difficulty of defining documentary due to its immense diversity and limitless subject focus, Dwyer argued that the documentary is gaining in visibility and influence in both Tunisia and Morocco despite enormous political and financial obstacles as well as considerable challenges in relation to distribution. The 2011 uprisings have helped documentary filmmaking to gain new momentum due to its urgency and immediacy.

In Morocco, the CCM has supported documentary filmmaking from the country’s independence in 1956. Most Moroccan films until the 1980s were largely shorts, made in the service of nation-building. CCM support continues today through financial aid to filmmakers every year in spite of the prominence of feature films among CCM-funded and internationally co-produced films. The institution has also supported documentary film festivals in Morocco such as FIDADOC in Agadir. The second public TV channel 2M has also supported the Moroccan documentary through production support and granting documentaries prime time on television. However, the institutional support for the Moroccan documentary remains insufficient, and documentary filmmakers have often complained about not feeling supported to the same extent as those making feature films. Dwyer also pointed out the existence of Moroccan documentaries produced outside the CCM and 2M circuits. For example, Guerilla Cinema has produced many online-distributed films by Nadir Bouhmouch in recent years.

Moroccan and Tunisian documentary films have also faced problems such as legal issues in the case of Mohamed Ulad Muhand’s Hercule contre Hermès (هرقل ضد هيرمس, Morocco 2012) and Nadia El Fani’s Laïcité Inch’Allah! (اللائكية، إن شاء الله!, Tunisia 2011). Dwyer also dwelt on similar problems faced by documentary filmmakers and anthropologists such as the delicate issue of how both relate to the subject of their inquiry. This relationship poses many ethical questions and can lead to censorship in various cases.

The Q&A session following the first keynote address pushed the discussion in new directions such as the emergence and role of a powerful player like Al Jazeera Documentary. This Qatari TV channel has sponsored and screened ever-larger numbers of Maghrebi documentary films or international productions on the Maghreb. Other comments and questions drew attention to the rise of transnational Moroccan-Israeli documentaries, which focus on the history and present of Moroccan Jews in Israel, Morocco and beyond.

The first panel of day 1 consisted of a paper by Abdelaziz Amraoui (Cadi Ayyad University, Safi). He dwelt on the attractive nature of Morocco to international filmmakers. This movement started almost at the same time that cinema was invented in the late 19th century. Amaraoui focused on how these films willingly and unwillingly have led to what he calls cine-tourism in Morocco. Many international tourists come to Morocco to visit, among others, film locations and sets especially in Ouarzazate, which is often called the African Hollywood. Internationally renowned films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Babel (2006) were partly or entirely made in Ouarzazate. However, the Moroccan tourism ministry does not seem to care about such tourism. A lot remains to be done to cash in on this desire by organising themed visits and other film-focused trips for national and international (film) tourists.

The afternoon session of the conference started with a keynote address by Hamid Aidouni (Université Abdelmalek Saadi, Tetouan). He started with some general remarks about Moroccan cinema in which he tried to debunk some myths about some films and filmmakers. He dwelt mostly on the films of Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011), one of the most famous and experimental Moroccan film directors despite the large interest he has generated in recent years. Aidouni borrowed Ali Safi’s phrase “Bouanani School” in Moroccan cinema. Bouanani was a unique filmmaker and talented artist and poet. His films like Mémoire 14 (1971) and Mirage (1979) are revered among large sections of Moroccan film scholars. They are visual poems. Aidouni showed clips from some Bouanani works. He also played clips from Mohamed Afifi’s equally experimental documentary Retour en Agadir (1967). It was filmed not long after the Agadir earthquake in 1960. Afifi and Bouanani are two of the great fathers of Moroccan cinema whom new generations of filmmakers have yet to kill for this (trans)national cinema to be reborn.

The conference’s last panel today was devoted to women in Moroccan cinema. The first speaker Nadir Bouhmouch (Moroccan filmmaker and activist) focused on what he called the “male condition” in Moroccan cinema. He read many Moroccan films through the lens of gender, class and ideology in “the New Urban Cinema” (NUC, Bahmad 2012, 2013). NUC was taken to task by Bouhmouch for its negligence of female characters despite its claim to social realism. He argued that these films focus on male characters, particularly degenerate patriarchs. The next paper by Zakia Salime (Rutgers University) analysed two documentary films on Moroccan youth cultures and women’s suffering and resistance in a patriarchal society. Farida Benlyazid’s Casanayda (2007) chronicles the renaissance of Moroccan youth cultures in music, lifestyle and cultural life in the 2000s. The film focuses on the city of Casablanca where Morocco’s first and largest urban music festival L’Boulevard takes place every year until 2016 when financial issues forced the organisers to cancel this year’s edition while working on new ways to finance the festival and guarantee its future. Hind Bensari’s documentary 475: Trêve de silence (2013) gives voice to many female victims of the infamous and even since amended Article 475 in Moroccan criminal law which allowed rapists to marry their victims so as to escape justice. The film also brings in some legal scholars who reveal the dark side of this law inherited from the colonial period. Said Chemlal presented the last paper on the panel and dwelt on the representation of Amazigh women in Najis Nejjar’s feature film Alen Zwanin / Dry Eyes (2003). This controversial film foregrounds the suffering of women in a remote village in the Moroccan Middle Atlas mountains. The film explicitly and sometimes unwittingly reveals the long suffering and marginalization of Amazigh people in their homeland.

The conference attracted a great deal of interest from Moroccan and other media outlets that are in Marrakech to cover the film festival, the largest of its kind in Morocco and the region. Dr Jamal Bahmad, one of the TMC team members, was interviewed for 20 minutes by Moroccan national radio this evening. This and other media will continue to cover our conference with more interviews and news stories due over the next few days. Stay tuned!

Jamal Bahmad