Monthly Archives: March 2018

Morocco Animated: the International Festival of Animated Film in Meknès

30 March 2018Animation, CCM, Festival, Moroccan Cinema, Tourismanimation, blog, FICAM, Meknes, MoroccoStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

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.

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.

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).

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

Faouzi and William: Volubilis, 2017

27 March 2018Festival, Moroccan Cinema, TangiersStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

What a film!

No wonder Faouzi Bensaïdi received most of the awards at the 19^th edition of the National Film Festival in Tangier from the festival jury: Grand prix du jury; Award for the script (written by Faouzi Bensaïdi); Best female actor for Nadia Kounda; Best male actor for Mouhcine Malzi; Best original music for Mike and Fabien Kourtzer.

Outside the jury, the film also received Prix de la critique awarded by the association of Moroccan critics, and Prix des ciné-clubs from the national association of ciné-clubs.

As the plethora of awards and triumphant accolades from the National Festvial attest, Volubilis is a film that succeeds and satisfies on multiple fronts : with the public in the theater, the festival people, and the cinéphiles (critics and cine-club goers).

At the National Festival in Tangier, Faouzi Bensaïdi presented Volubilis by describing it as a love story shot in dialogue with the tradition of the Egyptian melodrama – hence his careful attention to music and to structure. As the narrative unfolds, the two protagonists, Malika (Nadia Kounda) and Abdelkader (Mouhcine Malzi) who are in love and poor, will be separated and reunited. Towards the end of the film, there is even a party (in the Egyptian tradition), but it is no wedding with dancing and singing: Bensaïdi twists things with amused irony and the fiesta, instead of a prelude to happiness ever after, leads Malika to the discovery of what her husband has endured. When the haute bourgeoisie feasts, it is on the back of the humble people that it exploits.

The plot is straightforward: Malika and Abdelkader are married. He is a guard in a mall in Meknes, and she finds work as a maid in a bourgeois house owned by a woman whose husband is leaving her. One day, Abdelkader applies the rules and catches a woman brazenly walking past a long line of people waiting for their turn at an office, and orders her to queue up like everyone else. Outraged, the privileged woman vows to take revenge. She does so in the most hurtful way possible, through her husband (played by Bensaïdi himself). The payback for a lower-class man daring to counter a privileged member of the haute bourgeoisie is devastating: individual hogra (humiliation) is explored in all of its possible facets with relentless cruelty.

The filmic narrative also marks a return to the director’s native city: Meknes. The city has grown at different speeds depending on where one lives, since Bensaïdi left: the camera walks us in leafy neighborhoods with opulent villas, in dusty ones with huddled houses in various states of decrepitude, in newly built ones with cold, modern, project housing, and downtown with a modern shopping mall – the access to which the administration wants to restrict to wealthy customers. Only once do we escape from Meknes, when Abdelkader and Malika, cramped in the apartment of Abdelkader’s family, take a bus to Volubilis and walk among its ruins. Malika and Abdelkader can only share intimate moments away from the stifling home. These moments are imaged in delicate, nuanced ways: close-ups on interlaced fingers, of Abdelkader massaging cream into the hands of his beloved, as well as metonymic, extreme close-ups on the mouths of both protagonists sharing a juice. The latter has the erotic power of Gilda’s glove scene.

There is drama, melodrama, humor, beautiful shots and music. Here, the film talks to a wide audience looking for a good story well told.

The film also riffs on other cinemas, with shots reminiscent of Rear Window, of Mulholland Drive, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Tati, as well as quotations from Faouzi’s own filmography: just as the killer had covered the on-coming sound of a revolver shot in WWW by opening every single faucet in the lavatory, one after the other, mechanically (like Charlie Chaplin on the assembly line of Modern Times), the boss who orders torture covers the sound in a similar fashion by opening all windows looking onto the hustle and bustle of the street below. Two friends try acting like fundamentalists by putting kohl around their eyes (just as they had in Death for Sale). A couple starts a possible love story over the phone, just like in WWW. Not to mention the actors: Bensaïdi himself appears in the film, along with his spouse, Nezha Rahil, who bring their past roles into the decoding of the characters they play on screen. Here, the film talks to film buffs and to those familiar with Bensaïdi’s cinematography. In many ways, the film, solidly anchored locally (Meknes), speaks to an array of people simultaneously, just as Shakespeare did in his plays. The film finds all sorts of ruses to talk to everyone at the same time with impeccable maestria.

Florence Martin

Thoughts on the 19th National Film Festival, Tangier…à suivre

21 March 2018CCM, Cinemas, Festival, Tangiers, TransnationalStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

Established in 1982, the Festival National du Film (FNF) is devoted to screening the best of contemporary Moroccan feature films and short films from the previous twelve months. For the first seven editions, the festival took place sporadically, over 23 years in six different Moroccan cities. Then, in 2005, the 8^th edition was held in Tangier, which has remained the home of the festival ever since – with a shift to the festival being held annually there since 2010. And so, this year, between 9-17 March, the attention of the Moroccan film industry (as well as the TMC research team) was focused on the 19^th edition of the Festival National du Film in an unexpectedly rainy Tangier.

2018 was an important year for the festival in a number of ways. Firstly, it heralded the return of a number of key Moroccan filmmakers (including Faouzi Bensaïdi, Nour-Eddine Lakhmari and the newly appointed director of the Cinémathèque Marocaine, Narjiss Nejjar) whose work had been absent from the festival for too long, due to the rhythms of film production. Second, the 19^th FNF was also an opportunity to celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the ‘birth’ of Moroccan cinema, with a retrospective of classic Moroccan films running at the Cinéma Rif, alongside the fifteen features and fifteen short films that were being screened in competition a little way across town in the Roxy cinema. Parallel to the Moroccan cinema retrospective at the Rif were screenings of the hors compétition films, which included En Quête de la 7ième porte, a fabulous documentary on Bouanani by Ali Essafi. In conversations over mint tea or coffee between the screenings, there seemed to be as much talk about what had not been included in the retrospective of Moroccan cinema as there was around the selection of films in competition and those contemporary films screening hors compétition. Whilst it is, undoubtedly, a thankless task for any programmer to condense 60 years of Moroccan film history into a selection of fourteen films, the lack of a place in the selection for key films by Farida Benlyazid, Jilali Ferhati and Ahmed el Maanouni, was a surprise to me, at least.

Lastly, and most importantly, this was a significant year for the diversity of contemporary films on offer, given talk in recent years of a possible ‘crisis’ in Moroccan cinema. This diversity was displayed not only in the aforementioned ‘return’ to the festival of contemporary Moroccan auteurs but also in experimental film such as Hicham Lasri’s Jahilya, alongside popular genre cinema such as Korsa (Toukouna, 2018) as well as original approaches to the established trend of Moroccan films exploring the politics and trauma of the Years of Lead in Kilikis…la cité des hiboux (Lamharzi, 2017), Cri de l’âme (Eljaouhary, 2018). Finally, it was to be found in the outstanding documentary House in the Fields (Hadid, 2017), whose strength merely served to highlight the fact that documentary was, regrettably, under-represented at this year’s festival in both the feature and short film categories – although more visible in the hors compétition section.

In addition to the films being screened in the three strands of this year’s festival there was a concerted effort by the CCM to bring together a series of industry panels on co-production and distribution with invited guests from across the world – as well as a pitch competition for young filmmakers, a screenwriting and development workshop run by both MediTalents (a trans-Mediterranean initiative to promote and develop the projects of emerging filmmakers from across the Mediterranean region) and a specialist workshop on documentary funding by FIDADOC. All of these sessions took place in the Hotel Atlas Rif on the seafront – a key hub of industry activity during the festival – offering a much-needed forum and visibility for Moroccan filmmakers to engage with, learn from and network with industry experts from within and beyond Morocco.

These kinds of activities have taken place in previous editions of the National Festival: see for example Jamal Bahmad’s blog entry from last year’s FNF on the panel discussion on distribution and exhibition. However, there did seem to be a more consciously transnational outlook to this year’s industry focused events – an indication, perhaps, that more needs to be done to promote Moroccan cinema internationally in ways that have not always been presented as a priority in this and other Moroccan festivals (most notably and somewhat paradoxically, at the Marrakesh International Film Festival, where the focus has been on the glitz and glamour of the red carpet).

In the coming weeks, the TMC team will offer a series of more in-depth blog posts focusing on specific aspects of the festival mentioned above, as well as, of course (!) reactions and analyses of the films themselves that made up the 19^th Festival National du Film. To be continued…

Will Higbee

Dog days, border tales and gangsta nights: Moroccan cinema at the Berlinale 2018

6 March 2018Berlinale, CCM, Festival, Moroccan Cinema, TransnationalStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

Moroccan cinema was, again, well-represented at this year’s Berlinale – one of the most important events on the international festival calendar. For the fourth consecutive year (surely some kind of record!), Hicham Lasri had a film in the official selection of the Berlinale, this year screening in the Forum section of the festival with the world premiere of his latest feature Jahilya (2018) – produced by Lamia Chraibi. The film forms the third and final part of Lasri’s ‘Trilogy of the Dog’, following They Are the Dogs (2013) and Starve Your Dog (2015). Hence it continues the director’s preoccupation with examining Morocco’s socio-political and psychosocial dynamics from a range of perspectives, and foregrounds members of Moroccan society whose voices tend to be marginalised or denied by mainstream political and media discourse. As with all his previous films (including the Dogs’ Trilogy), Lasri combines an experimental approach to sound, image and narrative with dark humour and surreal interactions in everyday settings to expose the social violence and fracture that is engendered by divisive attitudes towards class, gender and generational difference in contemporary Moroccan society.

Jahilya interweaves six separate stories into its 94-minute narrative: a woman who is the victim of sexual violence, a suicidal man, a bigoted judge, a young boy who searches for mutton for a sacrificial feast banned by the king (Hassan II), a blind patriarch’s obsession with maintaining the racial ‘purity’ of his family in selecting a husband for his (pregnant) daughter and, finally, inexplicably, (hilariously) the shoe that was thrown at President George Bush Jr. by an Iraqi journalist during a press conference in 2008… As with virtually all Lasri’s work, the film is full of creative energy and invention, though the complex and at times bewildering connections between the six competing narratives make it difficult for the audience to identify with Lasri’s sombre assessment of the state of contemporary Moroccan society. This is certainly one film that I will need to return to when it screens again at the Festival National du Film in Tangier in March 2018.

World premiere of Apatride at Berlinale 2018

Alongside Jahilya in the Forum section of the main festival was Narjiss Nejjar’s much anticipated fourth feature Apatride/Stateless (2018). The film premiered at the festival in the beautiful Delphi Filmpalast. A full-house of several hundred spectators responded with enthusiastic applause at the end of the film and remained fully engaged for the 45-minute Q&A with director and cast that followed the screening. Also present at the premiere was director of the CCM, Sarim Fassi-Fihri, and the film’s Moroccan producer Lamia Chraibi, who as the producer of both Moroccan films in the Berlinale, has further enhanced her reputation as arguably the most talented and dynamic Moroccan producer working in the international film industry today. Apatride tells the story of Hénia, a middle-aged woman who lives in a small village on the Moroccan side of the Algerian-Moroccan border in an exploitative and complex domestic arrangement. On 18 December 1975, Hénia was deported by the Algerian authorities, along with 45 000 other Moroccan families (approximately 350 000 people), forced from their homes with little or no time to gather their belongings. More than three decades after this episode known as la marche noire, Hénia struggles to make sense of where she truly belongs. Some festival reviewers, such as the Egyptian critic and programmer Joseph Fahim, criticised Apatride for following the well-worn path in Arab cinema of exploring the place or women in Arabo-Islamic society and arriving at a predictable (for Fahim at least) critique of female subjugation in the Maghreb. Fahim is right that the theme is familiar to anyone who has taken even a remote interest in Maghrebi cinema over the past three decades. However, I would argue that the strength of Nejjar’s film is that it places this exploration of la condition des femmes in the context of a contested border space, in order to address urgent and far-reaching questions of how the border politics imposed by states in the name of protecting a sense of ‘national’ identity impacts directly on those who live side-by-side in these often-disputed border spaces. Nejjar contrasts the division and animosity between nations fostered by the presence of an official border, on the one hand, and the lived experience of locals that simultaneously support and challenge such divisions, on the other. In one particularly memorable scene, the armed border guards who had previously stood menacingly beneath their respective national flags, on opposite sides of the narrow channel separating Morocco and Algeria (across which Hénia will attempt to swim in her desire to ‘return’ to Algeria), exchange cigarettes and songs across the border fence – addressing each other not as enemies but as ‘brothers’. The fraught and often contradictory nature of co-existence in such a border space is beautifully evoked in Apatride by the cinematography of French DP Stéphane Vallée, as well as through powerful performances by the film’s cast of talented actors.

Beyond the festival screenings, Moroccan cinema also maintained a presence in the European Film Market, the meeting place for industry professionals that runs alongside the festival. The Moroccan film stand, organised by the CCM, occupied its now familiar space in the market on the first floor of the Marriot Hotel. It was teeming with activity, as foreign producers held meetings with officials from the CCM and representatives of production studios from Casablanca and Ouarzazate to discuss the possibilities and financial incentives for shooting in Morocco: a 20% tax credit for international productions spending over $1m in Morocco and shooting there for a minimum of 18 days, was recently approved by the Moroccan parliament. As in previous years, then, the desirability of Morocco as a production service location was, unsurprisingly, placed front and centre on the Moroccan stand. However, it was also good to see the Moroccan filmmakers in the festival being more fully promoted this year, indeed, celebrated, with large posters proudly announcing the presence of Jahilya and Apatride as part of the official selection in this year’s Berlinale.

Poster for Gangsta at the EFM in Berlin 2018

Elsewhere in the market, a different kind of (diasporic) Moroccan presence was on display with Gangsta (2018), the latest release by Belgian-Moroccan directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. The film, which follows the critically acclaimed Black (2015) is a high-octane thriller set in the working-class immigrant neighbourhoods of Antwerp and follows the lives of four drug-dealer friends who aspire to become organised crime bosses. At first glance, the premise of Gangsta may seem to fall back on all the wrong kinds of facile stereotypes of ‘immigrant’ communities as the host nation’s criminalised ‘other’. And yet, as with their earlier films Image (2014) and Black (2015), Arbi and Fallah have won critical acclaim for their latest outing, as well as considerable box-office success in their domestic Belgian market. Gangsta was screening in the European Film Market, with Indie Sales (the film’s international sales agents) hoping to attract the attention of international distributors for what is seen as an eminently marketable film for a crossover international audience. Fresh from their success of directing episodes of the US drama Snowfall and with rumours that they are being lined up by Hollywood execs to direct Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop 4, El Arbi and Fallah are currently one of the hottest directorial teams in Belgian cinema. Their global ambition is for their own brand of action cinema to reach an audience outside the auteur-led/world cinema festival circuit on which Jahilya and Apatride are set to travel over the coming months. As the Berlinale has showed us this year, the global reach of (transnational) Moroccan cinema takes multiple forms and an impressive array of routes to find its audience…

Will Higbee