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!
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.
TMC Project research associate Stefanie Van de Peer has just published a collection of essays on Animation in the Middle East (IB Tauris). Animated films from the Middle East and North Africa hardly ever make it into cinemas globally, or onto the film festivals circuit, let alone into academic studies of the art form. And yet, animation is an enormously popular art form that is widely practiced and exhibited. It is not only popular with local audiences, it is also a form through which artists can attain the representation of, on the one hand, a more complex transnational identity, and, on the other hand, a more expressive entrepreneurial outlook. With the rise of regional interests in the production, distribution and exhibition of local creative material, the fast developments in animation embody and reflect the cinema of the region’s growing confidence and substance on a global scale. The book aims to reveal the significance of animators in Middle Eastern and North African film culture, while rooting the contemporary developments firmly in a local interpretation of, and experimentation with, the art form.
Animation in the Middle East (IB Tauris, 2017)
One of the chapters in the book offers an in-depth study of animation in Morocco. Here, the author of that chapter, Dr. Paula Callus from Bournemouth University, offers a short overview of that chapter, to provide an introduction to the chapter on this neglected but inherently transnational form of filmmaking in the country.
The contemporary landscape of animation in Morocco is in the most part spoken of in digital contexts; on Facebook, blogs, Youtube, and other web-based platforms. So whilst Morocco has long standing engagement with film practices, with the establishment of the Centre Cinematographique Marocain (CCM) in 1944, animation in Morocco does not exist within the same narrative. This peripheral position is common across other histories of animation, that have taken a back seat to the more prominent moving images of live-action film. This has resulted in a notable lack of academic documentation around this form in particular in relation to non-Western contexts. The publication of Animation in the Middle East was an important and much needed contribution to knowledge that drew attention to the different histories and forms emerging from these contexts. The account of animation in Morocco, included in this publication, gave me an opportunity to
Two members of the TMC team, Florence and Jamal, attended the latest National Film Festival in Tangier (FNF, 3-11 March 2017). The annual festival is organised by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) in association with the National Association of Film Critics and local partners in Tangier. As Florence argued in a previous post for this blog, this year’s festival was characterised by the screening of many wonderful films, however, there were also films that raised questions about the quality and direction of Moroccan cinema.
On Sunday, 4 March, the Moroccan Chamber of Film Producers organised a roundtable as part of FNF. The roundtable helped illuminate some of the challenges facing Moroccan cinema today. The table was chaired by Jamal Souissi, the vice-president of the Chamber. In his introduction, Souissi warned that the incessant closure of cinemas in Morocco today is not only an economic problem, but also a social one.
Roundtable
The film critic and Rabat-based academic Omar Khammar was the first panellist speaking. He observed that although Morocco has many film schools today, the number of filmgoers is decreasing year after year. The digitisation of cinemas is not enough to bring back people to the cinemas. The problem needs to be tackled at the source. For Khammar, the digital revolution has upset the film scene, and Moroccan cinema needs to adapt to this revolution. Some people have built film screening rooms in their own homes. In addition, piracy is a big problem in Morocco, which will also not be solved by the digitisation of cinemas. This has been a key component of the CCM vs Pirates battle over the last two decades. The speaker also drew attention to the fact today’s youth don’t appreciate the conventional length of films: the notion of time has changed, and cinema has got to adapt to this situation. The Moroccan state is also responsible for the current crisis of Moroccan cinema because it has not educated youth to love and appreciate cinema. According to Khammar, this is part of the state’s long war against culture in postcolonial Morocco. Society has been invaded by commercial culture, which in turn has made people shun culture, cinema and reading. The tax rate on cinemas is unfair and to blame for part of the complex problem of cinema closures.
Among the multiple recommendations offered by Khammar to address this situation is the call to build cinemas in the Moroccan countryside. Local councils should spend some of their money on cinema and culture. In this vein, civil society organisations need to assume their role in spreading film culture in society to combat Islamism and other forms of intolerance and radical politics among youth. In addition, some mosque imams should be discouraged from lambasting cinema and films in their Friday sermons. Finally, Khammar pointed out that film advertising is very weak in Morocco, and something needs to be done about it. It is often foreign films that we see advertised on billboards and posters. In all cases, the solution to Moroccan cinema’s crisis will take long years if not a generation to be solved.
Noureddine Ayouch (second left), PR tycoon and father of Nabil Ayouch. Ayouch’s father has just made his first film.
The next speaker was Noureddine Ayouch. He started with an anecdote about an old film-house in Casablanca, which has been converted to a one-night stand hotel. Ayouch insisted on an honest diagnosis of the state of cinemas in Morocco. He also said that we need to make popular films like Road to Kabul (2011), a popular comedy about terrorism directed by Brahim Chkiri. According to Ayouch, Moroccans don’t like Moroccan films because they are not entertaining; they find them too cerebral. Another problem is that people don’t feel morally guilty when they buy pirated movies. This cuts across all social strata. The speaker also said that we shouldn’t rely on CCM money to make films. Filmmakers need to look for other financial resources to supplement funds, or make films without CCM funds at all. This is important, he said, because the CCM is also a censorship board, especially after the Islamists came to power in 2011. According to Ayouch, this has not been a good move for Moroccan cinema and society.
In the last part of his talk, Mr Ayouch offered a number of recommendations to lessen and gradually wipe out the crisis of Moroccan cinema in the globalisation era:
VAT tax on cinemas should be reduced to 5 percent if not cancelled altogether
The film community should directly address the King to resolve the problem of Moroccan cinema such as censorship and piracy
Help pirate film vendors sell legal copies of films instead of pirated ones: they should be helped to integrate the formal economy
Local councils should be encouraged to spend some of their budgets to build and support cinemas
Moroccan television needs to grant more space to film critics and film programmes
Moroccan film distributors need to export Moroccan films and become major actors in other film markets
Quotas for national films in Moroccan cinemas and TV should be introduced
Film investors need to invest in cinema in sub-Saharan Africa just like the rest of the Moroccan economic community today
More money needs to be spent on advertising films just like in the USA: the government needs to spend money on this by helping producers and distributors
The veteran filmmaker Latif Lahlou was the next speaker. He revealed his plan to build 400 cinemas in Morocco. This gargantuan project rests on the premise that we need to focus on the local to solve the problems of national cinema. He recommended that the state makes going to the cinema affordable for the average Moroccan. Lahlou stressed the need for affordable cinemas in working-class neighbourhoods because that is where the large and real audience for Moroccan cinemas is.
The next speaker was El Ayadi, a cinema owner. He pointed out that there is no political will to reform the film sector. The crisis of Moroccan cinema has been going for 25 years. Cinema owners are burdened with taxes while nothing is being done to fight piracy and encourage people to go to the cinema. The 20 % VAT is an aberration, said El Ayadi. It is time to reduce or cancel this tax to keep the few remaining cinemas open. The other problem is that CCM treats cineplexes like Mégarama and small cinemas the same. This is killing the small cinemas. The speaker said that it is no longer viable to own a cinema. The rate of frequency is 6 to 7 percent around the year. This needs to be raised to 20 percent at least to keep cinemas viable and open. The root of the problem is that 90 percent of Moroccans can’t afford the current price of cinema tickets. El Ayadi recommended the building of more neighbourhood cinemas to reduce the transportation costs for filmgoers. He went on to reveal that popular Moroccan films like El Ferrouj (2015) by Abdellah Ferkous saved the year for cinemas.
Popular films bring in money. That is why we need to refrain from judging films. Let us leave it to the audiences to choose and watch the films that they like. The CCM therefore needs to support both auteur and commercial films like El Ferrouj and The Road to Kabul. Otherwise, cinemas would close down, said El Ayadi.
He added that Moroccans need to learn more from the French system because it works. Cinemas are doing well in France. He emphasised that the French cinema system rewards popular films with a €1 million prize to each film that reaches 1 million entries. The cinema owner agreed with previous speakers that 20 % VAT is preventing investors from building or buying cinemas in Morocco. For him, public-private investments are needed and can be achieved by getting the CCM, local councils and other public bodies to put in some money to encourage private producers to invest in cinema.
The last intervener in the routable was Tarrous, who is a film critic and activist based in Tangier. He argued that film professionals ought to listen to the Moroccan public about this question. The scene is dominated by the views of film professionals. Since Moroccan films are subsidised by the taxpayer, we must find the audience for them and keep cinemas open: “Without the audience, Moroccan cinema wouldn’t survive for very long”. It is worth remembering that part of the justification for the public support for cinema is to provide some social welfare for film professionals. However, the professionals are doing next to nothing to attract the general public to watch their films. The Tangerine critic went on to say that the subsidy system is working, but it was high time some serious policies were introduced to help cinema self-support rather than always rely on public subsidies. Moroccan cinema needs an audience large enough to support it financially. Tarrous finally recommended that the current funding system should be revoked because it is not sustainable.
Q&A
The roundtable was followed by a vibrant and rich Q&A session. Many key actors in the Moroccan film scene who were in attendance took to the floor to voice their thoughts on the crisis of cinemas across the country. For Sarim Fassi-Fihri, the current CCM director, one of the problems that his institution faces, lies in the fact that most cinema owners do not submit their financial reports to the CCM in order to have a good idea about their problems. Ahmed El Maânouni (President of Moroccan Chamber of Moroccan Film Producers) discoursed next and said that more events like the National Cinema Day are needed to encourage Moroccans to become aware of their national cinema’s problems. He added that Morocco needs to learn from France by supporting cinema at every level from production to exhibition. Mohamed Abderrahman Tazi, a filmmaker and the director of the Association of Moroccan Film Producers, reacted by saying that we need to stop expecting help from the state and politicians: “We need to help ourselves. Filmmakers must do something or lessen the pain of Moroccan cinema today,” he said. For Hassan Benjelloun, also a filmmaker and the director of Moroccan Producers Chamber, cinema owners need to programme more diverse films every day instead of one film for weeks on end. This is because the cinema habitués are the same people who come again and again. They get discouraged by repetitive programming.
Part of the audience
Next to speak was Amina, a civil society activist. She highlighted that the crisis of Moroccan cinema is a symptom of the crisis of Moroccan modernity as a whole. Moroccan women used to go to cinemas on their own even when they hailed from traditional families. That is no longer the case, she said. Amina added that schools are the future of Moroccan cinema because we need to target young Moroccans to address the film crisis. El Othmani, a film professional, stressed the need for sociological studies about the Moroccan cinema-going public to better understand this problem. The subjective views of Moroccan film professionals will take us nowhere and cannot be the basis of serious solutions to the crisis of Moroccan cinema.
Jamal Eddine Naji, director of Audiovisual Communication at the Haute Autorité de la Communication Audiovisuelle (HACA), intervened by saying that the HACA has conducted a large-scale survey on Moroccan TV audiences. Someone needs to commission a similar survey about Moroccan film audiences. This is needed because we don’t know the audience for Moroccan cinema. He added that there is also a need to revitalise Moroccan cinema by creating a star system to help it stand on its own feet. Naji concluded that Moroccan filmmakers and actors in the film sector are called upon to use technology effectively in the digital revolution. Omar Ait Mokhtar, a film critic, festival organiser and film club veteran, retorted that Moroccan and international academics and students have carried out fieldwork on Moroccan cinema. What needs to be done is reading and translating some of their recommendations into reality.
Another speaker called for a national front for the defence of cinema to protect directors and film students from certain political currents and unemployment. The rich audience interventions continued with Mellouk, a film critic, revealing that Moroccans spend 250 MAD per month on audiovisual consumption: “That is enough. We just need to bring some of that money back into cinemas”. He explained that if we put together all that is spent on audio-visual production and advertising in Morocco, we get 100 billion MAD. This is a big industry. Cinema needs to place itself at or near the centre of this industry. The creative industries are major employers for the future. Bouchta Farqzaid, film critic, decried that piracy is killing Moroccan cinema. It has gone beyond pirated CDs. Hard drives with over 500 films are on sale on the black market. Boudih, a cinema owner, pointed out that cinemas cannot stand the situation anymore. The owners need urgent decisions rather than discourses and more roundtables. Finally, Benkirane, a film distributor, said that we need to save what can be saved. The social and economic living condition of Moroccans need to be improved to allow them to go to the cinema more often. Moroccan media and schools also need to encourage people to go to the cinema.
Happy TMC team in Tangier!
In conclusion, attending the National Film Festival in Tangier was very productive for the TMC team. The national festival is just what the Marrakech International Film Festival is not. In Tangier, there are roundtables and daily press conferences and discussions after each film screening. The Tangerine crowds are small but rich and friendly. Florence and I were witnesses to candid discussions about the state of Moroccan cinema. We left Tangier with plenty of ideas to share with Will and Stefanie, the two other TMC research team members, and process for the final outputs of the AHRC project.
Note 1 on the 18th National Film Festival in Tangier (3-11 March, 2017)
Festival National du Film Tanger
Just back from the 18th National Film Festival in Tangier, after having seen this year’s crop of films at the splendid Roxy Theater, downtown. Although smaller in number than last year (15 feature films instead of 25), they tackled a wide array of topics and genres ranging from fiction to documentary.
The theme of return seemed central to the preoccupations of this year’s selections: whether in time (e.g. Ahmed Baidou’s Addour on the resistance of the Amazighen to the French settlers), or in space to a Moroccan “home”.
The latter takes the form of various voyages back: by a child of Moroccan immigrants in Europe (Tarik el Idrissi’s documentary Le Voyage de Khadija/ Khadija’s Journey and Adil Azzab’s hybrid, deeply moving film My Name is Adil); by a Spanish veteran to the Riff region (Mohammed Bouzaggou’s Iperita); by the prisoners kept in terrifying jails by the Polisario (Louba El Younssi’s documentary, Les Miracles d’un serment / Miracles of a Vow).
The question is: to what and to whom exactly do these characters return?
What struck me this time around, especially after the previous year’s productions in which the patriarch was rendered impotent or murdered relentlessly from one film to the next, was the focus on the matriarch in a string of works. Here again, the image of the matriarch was diverse and yielded a complex representation of woman as mother, as abused and occasionally as abuser, as comedic, tragic, tender, brusque, and almost always a Moroccan version of Mother Courage surviving and protecting her brood against all odds.
In the comic register, two films: the long-awaited film by Ahmed el Maanouni, Fadma’s Hand in which Fadma (the mother and grandmother played by Fadila Benmoussa) is always a strong, brave woman who is hilariously funny and travels between Morocco and France, old and new generations, with grace and success. Her presence on screen dominates both literally (via constant close-ups and medium shots) and figuratively (in her dreams she flies over the world and we see her hovering over her sons, the earth, while La Callas sings in the background). This comedy featured actors who are well known TV comedians in Morocco to whom the audience reacted immediately (a strategy also used in The Rooster / Al Farooj (2014) or or La Isla (2015) by Abdellah Ferkous). Fadila Benmoussa plays opposite successful comedian Abderrahmane Ouaabad Eko (Fadma’s younger son, Karim).
The second comedy, Mohamed Achaour’s Lhajjates / The Old Ladies, shows four poor ageing women friends in diverse situations who decide to take revenge on their sad fates by stealing money from Mafioso-like boss who has fired one of them. The film is replete with gags and one-liners that sent the audience roaring with laughter. It features well-known actresses such as Raouia (a top actress in Moroccan cinema) and Fatima Bouchain (Fattouma in Road to Kabul, Brahim Chkiri, 2011).
These funny matriarchs are women without men, fighting for their children or for themselves, and relying on one another in the warmest of female solidarity in a Moroccan urban environment or the depressed Ardennes countryside in France (in the case of Fadma). In short, the patriarch is either off-screen or looming in the distance, occasionally at mid-distance, and the focus rests squarely on the older women and the humor they deploy to deal with daily issues.
In contrast, Hakim Belabbes’s Aida, in Pluie de sueur / Sweat Rain, stands tall, tragic, immensely brave and close to the earth, is stuck in poverty in her little village. Caring for both her son (who has Down syndrome) and her husband (who refuses to sell the land of his ancestors no matter how long the crippling drought lasts, and who keeps referring to his son as “the creature”), she is nurturing (she cooks a lot in the film!), collected, sweet, comforting, and by the end of the film, her identity as wife becomes completely subsumed by her identity as mother. The lavish photography (by Tunisian Amine Messadi) sustains both the epic and intimate dimensions of a family facing the lack of water in this portrayal of survival in rural Morocco: http://www.sweat-rain.com
Even Hicham Lasri’s cartoonish Headbang Lullaby contains an Amazigh female character whose husband has been in prison for years, and who therefore raises her son by herself. This is not the only film that alludes to the emotional and economic price mothers and wives (and their offspring) paid while their husbands were jailed during Hassan II’s years of lead. In this film as well as in Belabbes’s, the female character, deeply rooted in the land, stands strong for herself and others.
In Raouf Sebbahi’s road movie Hayat/Life that follows a bus from Tangier to Agadir and the crisscrossing stories that emerge from its newly created community of diverse passengers (very funny in places), also zooms in on women characters: a grandmother and her granddaughter, Hayat, traveling together, a middle-aged woman returning to Morocco, and finally a young woman reaching motherhood (she gives birth on the bus, helped by a doctor on board).
The apparent recurrence of the matriarch (whether a grandmother or a mother) on screen was also visible in some of the fifteen shorts. For example, Ayoub Laoussifi’s Tikitat a’Soulima / The Cinema Ticket tells the story of a little boy raised by a single mother (whose husband, once again, is in jail) who is harsh on him but ends up reconciled with him thanks to cinema. Karima Zoubir’s Derrière le mur / Behind the Wall shows a humble couple sharing an egalitarian view of the education of their daughter Nadia while Hicham Regragui’s Ima / Mother shows an old matriarch revealing a secret to her children before she dies. However, not all female figures are positive: a disturbing short, Dimma Bounaylat’s No evokes the rape of a little boy by a mature woman and the disastrous effects on his sexuality and view of women which will lead to murder.
So, what’s with all these matriarchs on screen this year? Perhaps, once the illusion of male power has been shattered on screen, the only remaining solid anchor available for one’s identity is the female one (even if No cautions against possible abuse). This recurring positioning of women at the center or close to the center of the filmic narrative while taking into account the emigration (Adil Azzab’s My Name is Adil), jail sentences, poverty of men, also focuses on women who speak, sing, feed and comfort; women who give birth and raise children, generation after generation. In the wake of Yasmine Kassari’s L’Enfant endormi (2004) on men’s migration to the North leaving their women behind to till an arid land and raise babies alone, this year’s films affirm that matriarchs and their daughters endure.
Florence Martin
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