The cinemas of Casablanca

Bollywood, Casablanca, Cinemas, Egyptian films, Transnational

On February 17, 2015, I met Abdellatif Labbar in the old theater district, a stone’s throw away from the Rialto. This delightful gentleman who used to program the films that were screened in Casablanca, reminisced about the golden age of cinemas in his fast-changing city and explained why Indian films were screened in Morocco.

Cinema Rialto
Cinema Rialto

“I was in charge of programming the films to be screened in Casablanca. There were over two hundred movie theaters in the Kingdom. Today we only have a little over fifty screens…” [fifty-seven, according to the Centre Cinématographique Marocain]. “Too much piracy and too little interest perhaps… People have changed… Look at the many old cinemas of Casa: the Rialto, the Vox, the Empire, the Colisée, the Lux, the Verdun… most of them are closed now, although in theory, a movie theater cannot be closed.

In the old days, we programmed films from the US, France, Italy, from all over Europe, but also, of course, a lot of Egyptian films. People loved swashbuckling films, American westerns. Each time we screened a film by Charlie Chaplin, it was always a hit! And it was a hit for a long time: people adored him! Some of the oldies, like Ben Hur or the films with Sidney Poitier were so popular they had a five-week run, especially in the summer… There were other sorts of hits: I remember Z by Costa-Gavras (1969), in particular. It arrived on Moroccan screens only in 1972. But the censors took it down on its second day of release. Too politically charged after the failed attempted coups against Hassan II [the Skhirat coup on July 10, 1971 and the aborted putsch of August 16 1972, dubbed “le coup d’état des aviateurs”]… When the film was reissued ten years later, people flocked to it! And it showed at the Rialto and the Vox for weeks on end.

Cinema dealt with language in an interesting way: the Moroccan audience saw the French versions of the films coming from the United States. Gone with the Wind, for instance, was dubbed in French. So were the westerns with John Wayne. Only a handful of French films were dubbed in darija to accommodate the local audience – Fantômas and later Fanfan la tulipe come to mind – otherwise, most French films were screened in their original versions. The same went for Egyptian films, of course. Moroccans, like other people in the Arab world, learned the Egyptian dialect via Egyptian radio (Voice of the Arabs), TV and cinema.

In 1963, however, Morocco and Algeria fought on border issues. Egypt, recently independent and led by Gamal Nasser, sided with the Algerian FLN against Morocco. In reprisals, the Kingdom broke all diplomatic ties with Egypt. As a result, we could no longer import Egyptian films. This is when Morocco started to import films from India massively, and dub them in darija. We were inundated with Indian films! Lots of Indians had moved to Tangier when it was an international city, had married Moroccan women and settled in various urban centers throughout the Kingdom. Some of their translations were hilarious!”

Florence Martin

Moroccan cinema in Berlin

Berlinale, CCM, Transnational, ,

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

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

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

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

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

Will Higbee

Death of the father at the National Film Festival, Tangiers 2016.

Tangiers, Transnational

In the latest production of Moroccan cinema, father figures seem not to fare very well. For instance, in Nabil Ayouch’s Horses of God (2012), the father is impotent, silent, at the mercy of his wife and children for sustenance; in Noureddine Lakhamri’s Zero (2012), he is an invalid entirely dependent on his son to survive. The films shown at the 17th National Film Festival in Tangiers show a similar, consistent, relentless trend. To wit:

Tears of Satan (Hicham El Jebbari, 2015) is an action-packed road-movie that narrates the revenge story of a former prisoner who finds his torturer from the years of lead. In a stunning reversal of the Abrahamic myth, the same hyper-masculine torturer ends up killing his own son, before being killed himself. Here the masculine authority figure is completely destroyed, harrowing moment after harrowing moment.

Midnight_Orchestra_poster
Filmposter Midnight Orchestra, Jérôme Cohen Olivar (2014)

In Midnight Orchestra by Jérôme Cohen Olivar (2014), musician Marcel Abitbol, the father of protagonist Michael Abitbol, dies within the first four minutes of the film! If the rest of the film tries to piece together why Marcel abruptly left Casablanca in 1973 (to the sound of Marcel Abitbol’s music), it does not show the death of the father: it shows the dead body, the aftermath, the homage to the father, while the father himself is largely absent from the screen.

Such is not the case in Hicham Amal’s Morphine Melody (2013), that features a young composer who, after losing his inspiration to compose and yen for life, finds new creative ideas for his opus magnus from the very cries of pain of his dying father. Here, although he is heard a lot, he is ill, powerless, dependent and facing his impending death. In that, he is the same father as Ayouch’s or Lakhmari’s, or, for that matter Mohamed Ismaïl’s Des…Espoirs / Despair (2015) powerless, and destitute father figure. In this film, the protagonist’s father is alcoholic, poor, passive, and dominated by his second wife (after she first abandoned him and his son, Amine). Eventually, he is slain by her in front of his son. The ensuing trauma causes Amine to have serious problems with women throughout his life.

A father’s premature death causes irreparable damage to his children, as is also clearly shown in Mohamed Chrif Tribak’s Petits Bonheurs / Happy Moments: the father has just died at the opening of the narrative and his absence entails economic and emotional hardship on his young widow and teen-age daughter.

Again, in Saïd Khallaf’s A Mile in My Shoes, the protagonist’s father dies when Saïd is a child. Saïd murders his stepfather (an ogre-like character who embodies the bad father-figure). Yet the assassination is literally staged: the film juxtaposes theatrical scenes with non-theatrical ones, and the death of the father is filmed like a ritualistic murder on an empty stage, lit by an unforgiving spotlight. This film won the grand prix at the National Film Festival.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I did not mention Driss Chouikha’s Resistance, a national epic about decolonization that starts in 1953. The hero, Abderrahmane, a young freedom fighter, has lost his (good) father who died at the hands of the French, and marries a young woman whose father is a collaborator of the colonizer. Abderrahmane’s people execute the (bad) father-in-law (causing some degree of discomfort in Abderrahmane’s marriage…). In this film, the masculine figure of undisputed authority, the King, is only perceived via the roaring engine of his approaching plane above, and cheers of the expectant crowd amassed below. Here, the absence or remoteness of the good father verges on the sacred. The filmed death of the father is only that of the bad father. The good father remains soundlessly off screen, untouched.

Florence Martin

Transnational Moroccan Cinema with a dinghy

Cinemas, Marrakech, Transnational,

On my trip preparing for our research project’s first symposium in December and scouting for venues, caterers and hotels, I went to see La Isla de Perejil by “l’enfant terrible du cinéma marocain”, Ahmed Boulane. Florence Martin writes about it in her first blog entry, from 4 February 2016. The film and its director are part of the transnational injection into Moroccan cinema, as Ahmed Boulane himself comes from the former pirates’ republic of Salé, took on the Irish nationality, and made a film dealing with the absurd situation that caused an international incident between Spain and Morocco in 2002. Co-produced with Boulane-O’Bryne Production (Casablanca) and Maestranza Film (Sevilla), Boulane co-wrote it with Spaniard Carlos Dominguez. Boulane is best known for his second feature film, The Angels of Satan (2007), about a scandal that shook Moroccan sensibilities in 2003: the case of a group of young Moroccan heavy-metal rockers wrongly accused of being Satanists. The film became a real Moroccan box office hit in 2007.

Poster La Isla, Ahmed Boulane, 2015.
Poster La Isla, Ahmed Boulane, 2015.

One of the best discoveries watching La Isla de Perejil was the main actor: Abdellah Ferkous, with his quietly, tongue-in-cheek, playful style of comedy. His rotund looks, typical moustache and big cheeks give shape to the comic identity of this TV actor and his character in La Isla, Ibrahim, a soldier of the Auxiliary Forces. At the start of the film one gets a sense of his modest background, his simple life and his contentment with his small (and poor) family, living with their chickens. He likes simple pleasures such as coffee and food, and his satisfaction with life comes through in little rituals, visible for example in the manner in which he wakes up his children and the repeated stretching and washing of his hands and face.

Just before his retirement, Ibrahim is sent to the tiny Isla de Perejil on the northern coast of Morocco, whose sovereignty is disputed by Morocco and Spain. His mission is to monitor the passage of smugglers, illegal migrants and drug traffickers. His rituals continue on this island, although his radio contact with the mainland breaks up and he is alone apart from the company of a cockerel and a goat. One day, while bathing, Ibrahim discovers that the sea has washed ashore an illegal migrant from Senegal. Close to death, Mamadou is carried to Ibrahim’s makeshift home. At first he is treated with suspicion but Ibrahim slowly nurses him back to health, and the two characters bond over food, music and the radio Mamadou has brought along in a plastic bag. As they try to establish their means of survival, they become friends and Ibrahim protects Mamadou, his cockerel and his goat. When Mamadou suggests they eat the animals, Ibrahim is taken aback and assures the Senegalese man that he does not eat his friends. With the growing solidarity between the two men, the international incident that is brewing in the background, and of which they are completely ignorant, becomes ever more absurd: not only is the island tiny, the loneliness there brings two strangers and potential enemies together, while Spanish and Moroccan politicians direct a diplomatic conflict and a military attack on one another.

Watch the film’s trailer here.

Loosely based on an actual conflict between Spain and Morocco in 2002, this is a gentle farce that reverberates with political undertones. Not only does it look in some detail at the refugee crisis and the possibility of solidarity between Africans in their ‘fight’ against the European coloniser, it also makes fun of this coloniser in his inability to deal with Moroccan sovereignty. The film has a satirical bite to its treatment of the relationship between the Spanish and the Moroccans, but the postcolonial critique does not spare the ineptitude of Moroccan politicians either. The concept of nationhood, this film tells us, is hollow: the island is abandoned, but the moment someone sets foot on it and raises a faded, washed-out Moroccan flag (orange and yellow instead of bright red and green), the neo-colonialist tendencies of territorialism come flooding back. The absolute absurdity of this conflict is highlighted by the filmmaker, as he emphasizes the smallness of the island, and uses a comical actor as the single, middle aged soldier rather than the historical team of six Moroccan soldiers ‘invading’ the island with a dinghy.

Stefanie Van de Peer

The Petits Bonheurs of Women in Moroccan film

Cinemas, Egyptian films, Marrakech, Moroccan Cinema

As Florence wrote in her blog on the death of the father in recent Moroccan films (15 March), Petits Bonheurs by Mohamed Chrif Tribak starts immediately after the death of a father and looks at the consequences for a poor widow Zineb and her seventeen-year-old daughter Nouffissa. However, the film does not reflect on this bereavement, and pragmatically looks forward at the future and dreams of a teenager in 1955 Morocco. In hindsight of course this is appropriate, as Morocco is about to gain independence, and the role of women is about to change dramatically. That this film focuses so singularly on women’s lives and roles, shows a turn in Moroccan cinema (even by men) towards the female sphere. I read a few similarities with some Tunisian films into this film.

Poster Petits Bonheurs, Cinema Colysee
Poster Petits Bonheurs, Cinema Colysee

As a widow unable to meet her and her daughter’s basic needs, Nouffissa’s mother is forced to accept the invitation from Lalla Amina, a wealthy woman, to settle at her large home. There is a suggestion that Amina and Zineb were “more than just friends” in the past. The film deals with girls’ education, domestic roles and appropriate dress sense. Within this large house in the medina of Tetouan, an ambiguous friendship parallel to Zineb and Lalla Amina’s develops between Nouffissa and Fetouma, granddaughter of Lalla Amina.

Perhaps the most interesting sequence is the group of women’s excitement about a new film with a famous, handsome actor, and their attendance at the cinema of this Egyptian melodrama. In the film, emotions run much higher than they do in Petits Bonheurs itself, but the experience of going to the cinema is a reason for excitement. The girls recall that just a few years ago they were hardly allowed to go outside. It is, as a matter of fact, Nouffissa’s first time at the cinema, and she looks in bewilderment at the screen, but also at the ‘rencontres’ between girls and boys around her. It makes her innocent outlook on love and marriage all the more endearing.

The two girls, both living under pressure of tradition moving into modernity, have divergent views. While Nouffissa does not wear the veil and Fetouma does, Fetouma embodies the rebellious girl, who rejects the idea of ​​early marriage and hopes to continue her studies, while Nouffissa would like to find a husband as she aspires upward social mobility. In this way, the film shows some parallels with Tunisian Nouri Bouzid’s Hidden Beauties (2012). Their relationship comes under pressure when Fetouma confesses she has had sex but is not interested in marriage, while Nouffissa hides from Fetouma her engagement to someone she does not know.

With exquisite detail, the film showcases the architectural, decorative and fashion trends of the 50s and 60. It also looks at both the modern and traditional styles and modes of thinking by women, and shows the power of the static camera and the reflexive, slow development of a simple, straightforward story. Careful with the male gaze, the camera and the director manage to remain unobtrusive fairly successfully, except when Fetouma acts on an instinctual and naïve act of lust on the impressionable Nouffissa.

Cinema Colysee, Gueliz, Marrakech
Cinema Colysee, Gueliz, Marrakech

The film offers a calm balance and a sense of peace with fate. While it does not totally eschew political or feminist rhetoric, it also does not foreground it. With this comes a certain risk taken by the director: the film shows some similarities with Tunisian Moufida Tlatli’s The Silence of the Palace (1994), but where Tlatli’s film is outspoken about women’s voices being drowned out by men and the uncertainties independence brings for North Africa, Petits Bonheurs seems more interested in a happy ending (see the title of the film, indicating little pleasures). I suspect this is where its accessibility lies, and its success with large local audiences. Garnering standing ovations and winning important prizes on the festival circuit inside Morocco, and being screened at the large multiplexes as well as the more discerning cinemas to large audiences, is proof of this film’s subtle yet permissible look into the past of Moroccan women. It is precisely the subtlety with which it acts that attracts a large female crowd to the cinema.