The Non-Fabulous Destiny of Najat Benssalem: Raja Bent El Mellah, Abdellah El Jaouhary, 2015 (70 minutes)

Marrakech, Tangiers, , ,

This documentary has haunted me ever since I saw it at the National Film Festival in Tangier in late February. Who is Raja? Is it Jacques Doillon’s protagonist (in his film Raja, 2003), played by Najat Benssalem, whose brilliant performance earned her two awards for best actress in Venice and in Marrakesh? Is it “the daughter of the old district” of Marrakesh, a poor section of town where she barely survives? El Jaouhary deploys his narrative between these two identities.

The film opens under the limelight of the Marrakesh International Film Festival: the young actress is called to the stage to receive her award and does not show up. We are told that Najat has been caught in one of those epic traffic jams. A young French female producer even adds that it is so like Najat to be late…

The camera flips to Najat who has arrived, but without an invitation, most probably because she has not received it – she was sent one but her address keeps changing. She lives a life off the grid in all senses of the term. Hence Najat is standing outside the Palais des Congrès, unable to produce the required invitation, and the guards do not let her in. Since then, every December, Najat goes to the Palais des Congrès and tries to get in the world of cinema she was briefly part of, and in which she craves to be. Yet the same story repeats itself in a depressing loop: she cannot get in. As the documentary proceeds, several readings of her exclusion emerge: a racist one, a classist one, a gross injustice, bad luck. Even her male co-star in Raja, Paul Grégory, evokes mektoub: “it was not her destiny” to be part of the Festival!…

The narrative of the documentary sits gingerly at the confluence of old fairy tales and a new spin on neo-realist cinema. A destitute young woman in the old city of Marrakesh is suddenly chosen to play a role in a French film. She lives an enchanted life during the shoot, becomes a recognized star, to then return to her former place and status. The magic of cinema does not have the power of a good old fairy godmother: the ball is short-lived. Cinderella remains Cinderella.

This is almost a moral tale: when a poor young Moroccan inner-city woman whose destiny is not to become a movie star actually becomes one, she is denied access to the limelight.

Najat Benssalem
Najat Benssalem

It is the story of a transformation that goes awry – literally, physically so. At the beginning of the film, Najat looks like Raja: a slim young woman who, equipped with boxing gloves, earns a meager living by wrestling with customers on the Jemaa el Fna square in Marrakesh. As she walks around the city in pants and T-shirt, she exudes an austere, almost androgynous kind of beauty, her body limb and lithe. Some cinema people interviewed in the film say she cannot find a part in any of the films that are produced on site because her body does not fit the Moroccan standard of feminine voluptuous beauty. Two years later, she has ballooned up and no longer resembles Raja, her former image on screen. She survives by selling individual cigarettes to passers-by, and adds layers of strange-looking clothes in the winter to keep herself warm. In the end, she looks like an odd, overgrown child in a pair of warm garish pink pyjamas walking around Jemaa el Fna, offering cigarettes to strangers…

Najat was in attendance at the festival in Tangier, in her new large body, her eyes blinking under the flashes of cameras as she exited the film projection at the Roxy Theater. I wondered whether we would see her next December in Marrakesh around the Palais des Congrès where she returns like a moth attracted to a ruthless burning light.

Florence Martin

Noureddine Saïl on the cinemas of old Tangiers, languages, and happy schizophrenia! (May 7, 2016)

CCM, Cinemas, Egyptian films, Tangiers, ,

The philosopher and former head of the CCM (Centre du Cinéma Marocain) was in his native city to attend the 20th edition of the Salon International de Tanger des Livres et des Arts, organized by the French Institute. The theme this year was “Tangiers as a Symbolic City: from Fantasy to Reality”. Asked to address cinema in Tangiers, Saïl took a detour via the cinema houses of his childhood and teenage years. He developed a Tangerine topography of picture-houses along the two axes of space and time: the medina corresponded to early childhood; the larger city of Tangiers to teen-age years. He first evoked two old movie theaters that are now reduced to spectral architectural presences in the city: The Capitol and the Alcazar.

Noureddine Saïl (on the left) and Moumen Smihi
Noureddine Saïl (on the left) and Moumen Smihi

The Capitol specialized in westerns, and introduced the six or seven year old to John Ford and his narrative strategies, and all sorts of other American films. The films were dubbed in Spanish (the city still had its international status at the time) – so much so that Saïl would be shocked to discover, at age thirteen, that Cary Grant actually spoke English! The second theater, L’Alcazar, specialized in Spanish and Mexican romance and comedy. It was the theater where Joselito was the singing star of El Pequeño Rosiñol. The children had no clue Franquist Spain was busy spreading its messages through the charming little boy. They sang with him…

As the Tangerine children grew to reach the ripe age of ten, the circuit of movie theaters would widen and include Cinéma Vox, “the total capital of Egyptian cinema”. This is where they discovered Anwar Wagdi’s 1949 Egyptian classic Ghazal al Banat / The Flirtation of Girls, finally released in Tangier in 1957. To Saïl, this was “a complete earthquake of the senses, each component of the film having reached its utmost completeness”. The photography, the music, the dance, the range of emotions held the children under an enduring spell.

All these cinemas, Noureddine Saïl added, were part of the medina, i.e. steeped in an idyllic Tangier made of multiple cultures, languages, mores, religions, cuisines, in which people lived in a form of consensual conviviality. Stepping out of the perimeter of these picture houses through the Rue de la Liberté (sic!) meant venturing into a less colorful territory. But only there, at age fourteen, was he given the chance to see Buñuel’s surprising films at the Mauritania. This was a costly endeavor: all films at the Mauritania were twice the price of those at l’Alcazar. So the kids of Tangier would wait for “the film to come down to the Alcazar” for a couple of months, and resume their attendance at the old medina theater where the less intellectual films ended up… At the Mauritania, though, it was clearly the more complex films that attracted the teens.

“Through the Tangier of the time, we developed in a schizoid way (seeing films in all languages, speaking several ourselves) where, elsewhere, people develop in a paranoid way. Cinema was part of that.”

Florence Martin

Short Cuts Moroccan Style

Marrakech, ,

The response to TMC’s call for applications for our two London Film School (LFS) bursaries was impressive both in terms of quantity (over 35 applications for 2 places) and in terms of the quality of the applicants.

With each applicant submitting two short films as part of their application, much of late July and August for those on the selection panel was taken up with viewing short films by the next generation of Moroccan filmmakers. As such, the exercise of shortlisting candidates and eventually finding our two candidates for the LFS bursaries also provided an ideal opportunity to take the pulse of short filmmaking in Morocco today.

The panel was impressed by the quality and diversity of submissions received, with a pleasing range of shorts across documentary, narrative and even some non-narrative experimental work. We were struck by the new and original directions that these young filmmakers were taking within their short films, including: experimentation with non-linear narrative, film form and style, realism and surrealism, as well as adaptations that re-worked classical European literature into a contemporary Moroccan setting. However, what was also apparent in the submissions that we received was how many filmmakers of these young filmmakers were developing in new ways the preoccupations that have characterised contemporary Moroccan cinema since the late 1990s: social realist and (often violent) neo-noir narratives that focus on the challenges and inequalities facing Moroccan urban youth; an exploration of the collective and individual psychological traumas resulting from the Years of Lead; an impulse to document the traditions of rural cultures and communities that may seem at odds with a modern and increasingly globalized society; meditations on the forces that drive many young Moroccans to emigrate from their homeland and the conflict that this can generate for both the individuals and their families; and finally films (both documentary and fiction) that foreground the experience of a range of female protagonists and experiences in their narratives. We were also very pleased by the high technical quality exhibited in the corpus presented, in particular in terms of the visuals, soundtracks and artful editing skills that showed a solid degree of professionalism.

In the end, after prolonged deliberation, the panel decided to award the two LFS bursaries to Saida Janjagua and Mahassine El Hachadi. Saida and Mahassine impressed us with the quality, vision, originality and (it must be said) cinematic beauty of their filmmaking. We are delighted to be welcoming them to London in January 2017 to spend a term in residence at the LFS and hone their skills while learning and collaborating with staff and students. The bursaries will allow them to establish their own connections with British filmmakers whilst acting as artistic ambassadors for the Transnational Moroccan Cinemas project and Moroccan cinema more generally. We hope that their time at the London Film School will benefit their careers as emerging Moroccan filmmakers whose work has the potential to reach international audiences, AND will produce films and collaborative creative work that can be included in the programme of new Moroccan cinema that TMC will be curating as part of the 2018 African in Motion Film Festival.

Given the Marrakech International Film Festival’s recent announcement that it will be winding down the Cinécoles initiative (a short film competition held as part of the festival and intended to promote emerging filmmakers from film schools in the country) one could fear that short filmmaking was entering a more precarious state in Morocco, now that its new generation of aspiring filmmakers are denied this opportunity. However, the quality, range and imagination of short films and filmmakers that we have been privileged to view over the past two months, leaves the TMC project team feeling optimistic about the next generations of cinematic talent emerging from the Kingdom.

Will Higbee and Flo Martin

Hello world!

Transnational, , , , ,

Welcome to the Transnational Moroccan Cinema blog. The researchers on the project will regularly post materials, interviews, reflections and results of archival research here. If you would like to contribute a guest-blog, please get in touch with the project’s research assistant, Dr Stefanie Van de Peer – S.E.Van-De-Peer@exeter.ac.uk, and we’d be very happy to consider your work for inclusion.