Category Archives: Casablanca

The Days / Ayam by Sofia El Khyari: the Revelation of FICAM

22 April 2018Animation, Casablanca, Festival, Meknes, Moroccan Cinemaanimation, MeknesStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

Aside from last week’s discussed feature-length films that attract full audiences and long discussions with filmmakers, sometimes serious and sometimes dominated by the kids in the room, we also followed the exciting experiments that were showcased in the short film competition at FICAM. In the second batch of shorts screened on Sunday evening, we saw the usual (great!) French, Canadian and Croatian work, but to be completely honest, we were there specifically for the Moroccan short, Ayam / The Days, by Sofia El Khyari.

On occasion, the festival has included screenings of local productions in the past; for example – as Paula Callus has shown, in 2002 Hamid Semlali’s L’oiseau de l’Atlas (The Bird of the Atlas, 2002) was screened. Semlali’s ten-minute film was exceptional on two counts: firstly as a rare example of a local animation screened at an international festival, and secondly as a case of a Moroccan animation receiving funding from the CCM (100,000 dinars). But these films are rare, and so the hunger for Moroccan animations is huge at FICAM. The excitement about Sofia El Khyari’s film was palpable as she introduced the film.

The director of the festival was equally excited about the presence of a Moroccan film in the short film competition, and Alexis Hunot, doing the introduction to the screening of the selection, encouraged everyone in the room to vote on their audience voting slip, adding that of course they would be expecting to see many vote for Sofia’s film.

Born in Casablanca in 1992, Sofia El Khyari left her native Morocco for Paris after she finished school. She trained in creative industries management and taught herself animation with various workshops in France. She spent time in China and then settled in London where she is now pursuing a master’s degree in animation at the Royal College of Arts in London, where Ayam was made. Ayam uses mixed-media paper cut-out, stop-motion, acrylic paint and soft pastels, ink and crayon on brown paper in an animation that combines elements of old school Asian anime films as well as distinct Moroccan aesthetics such as soft contours, bright colours, decorative backgrounds, geometrical shapes and organically flowing lines and calligraphy.

The filmmaker told her audience that the film is inspired by her mother and grandmother, and their love for one another and for her, and on the anecdotal nature of conversations, stories and history-telling in her house, in particular during the traditional tea ceremony of Eid Al Adha. Indeed, El Khyari seems to be mostly interested in women’s particular perceptions of the world, as her previous work, available here, elaborately shows. Curious about everything cosmopolitan, she develops a mixed dream world where the female figure is queen.

In Ayam this becomes very clear, and in this film the main inspiration is women of older generations: her mother and grandmother. The film is dedicated to the female characters in her life, and depicts in three and a half short minutes, the preparation for the tea ceremony. Grandmother and mother talk about the glasses being clean, the tea hot and the table being set, as the young daughter remarks she thought that grandmother could not read because she has never been to school. It quickly becomes clear that grandmother is from an age where women were not encouraged to go to school, but that she was pragmatic enough to make sure she learnt reading and writing on her own terms, from her older brother, when he came home from school. Likewise, the mother figure shows how having a daughter now is crucial to her own role as a woman, and she has sacrificed her own ambitions to ensure her daughter can go to school and encourage her to get the best grades she can. In return, the granddaughter shows her love for her mother and grandmother by representing them in a stunning short documentary tale of cross-generational solidarity and warmth. Especially in the subtitles, which are encased in elaborately decorated frames, and in the calligraphic elements that come to life in the film and show the beauty and importance of Arabic script. In an interview, Sofia told me she thought long about what to do with the subtitles, as she studies in Britain and is aware of the dislike of British audiences for subtitles. Her tutor recommended she make a feature of the subtitles, as part of the mixed-media aesthetic of the film. Sofia then sought inspiration in ancient Arab storytelling, the 1001 Nightsin particular, and created paper-framed text for the subtitles, an inherent part of the beautiful aesthetics on screen.

This interest in the written word is also reflected in her use of calligraphy in the abstract art backgrounds of the otherwise figurative depictions of the women. This is especially interesting if we read it in the context of Laura Marks’ theory on calligraphic animation, and the importance of calligraphy in Arab animation at large. As Marks says: ‘many artists are bringing Islamic textual aesthetics to contemporary media art, and thus they are enriching this art’s qualities of latency, performativity, and transformation’ (2011). Marks showed how one of the most popular non-figurative Islamic arts, calligraphy, in many respects is in itself animated: its written words or single letters encapsulate life and movement in their fluidity. Calligraphic artworks, while they do not depict living forms, do embody the movement of life itself. ‘Watching calligraphic animation, we feel empathy with the letters as they swoop free of their symbolic constraints and become animated, take on (non-organic) life’ (2011). In this view, letters have inherent meaning: the meaning is there behind the surface of the animated image, in the code.

Ayam has already done the rounds at some of the most important animation film festivals in the world. It also screened at the Cardiff Animation Festival in Wales this past week (19-22 April). It won the audience award at FICAM in Meknès. The filmmaker’s parents were present and obviously very proud. Sofia said she wanted her parents to come along to the screening, as her journey towards becoming an animation artist has been a long and hesitant one, because family and friends have worried about the financial viability of a career in the arts and animation. Yet she deeply believes in the value of the animated image, and has done so since she was only 15 years old. The animator dedicates time to all aspects of her animated art: she composes the music and sings for her own films, she explores different media and art forms, and harvests inspiration from all over the world. She is aware of the practical obstacles to young Moroccan filmmakers in general, and animators in particular, but hopes to continue to meet the right people who she can enthuse about her stories and styles in the future. She is currently working on her graduation project from the Royal College of Art, which will focus on the relationship between women and water. She is researching specifically Arab women that can be an example to her art and her ambitions and while she wants to work in Morocco, she is mostly interested in international co-production in order to maintain the inspiration flowing beyond borders and in order to maximise other areas’ increasing interest in funding and supporting new and young animating artists.

Sofia also recognised, in this context, that one of the things FICAM does so well is organise workshops and presentations, and network opportunities for students and young artists. It is very well-organised, timetabled and accessible for children as well as students and the wider public. Quite the relief after the “private” festival that is the FNF in Tangier, where the public is not allowed anywhere near the cinema. The amount of young Moroccan students of animation, walking around at FICAM with their portfolios under their arms is exciting to see.

That’s why, after one of the best presentations of the festival, by Rachid Naim from the University of Safi, on the representation of the Arab in American animation, the discussion’s turn to the lack of Moroccan animation was so surprising to me. Firstly, Rachid’s presentation was eye-opening. Not in the sense that he broached a subject that we are all very familiar with, namely the racism in Disney’s Aladdin and the problematic depiction of the “bad” Arab in Hollywood, but in the sense that he gave me, personally, a fresh new insight into his vision of Orientalism, with references to so many others than Edward Said. He elaborated on the creation of the 1001 Nightsand their origins, not as Arab tales but as being from all over the Middle and Far East, or the invention of Ali Baba and Sindbad by the chroniclers, French and British. That these characters are ‘good’ guys in the 1001 Nightsand become bad guys in Popeyeand Bugs Bunnyfilms adds interesting materials to Jack Shaheen’s famous work on Hollywood’s “Reel Bad Arabs.” The discussion after Rachid’s talk turned very animated when Alexis Hunot pointed out that there is no Moroccan animation. Clearly Sofia El Khyari’s film contradicts this throwaway statement, and the presence of so many ambitious students does as well. I was itching to point this out to him, and so did the students. My good friend Paula Callus has of course also written a rich chapter on Moroccan animation in the edited collection on Arab animation, so there certainly is more than Alexis acknowledged. I wonder if it was a tactic on his part to encourage the students to really pursue their animation dreams. FICAM is certainly the right place to do so, as it is one of the only platforms in Morocco for animated cinema. Long long long may it live on and celebrate animation from Morocco!

Source:

Laura Marks, ‘Calligraphic Animation: Documenting the Invisible’, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 6, 3 (2011), pp. 307-323.

Noureddine Lakhmari’s Burnout: the anti moucharabieh cinema!

16 October 2017Casablanca, Moroccan Cinema, Tourismblog, cinema, Moroccan CinemaStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

Lakhmari’s Burnout has just been released in Morocco and it is quite an event! It came out on October 11 in the major cities (where there are still movie theaters…).

When I saw Noureddine Lakhmari in Tangier briefly the week before, he had told me how Moroccan cinema was not what Moroccan tourism was about: “it is not about the food, the tiles, the camels – have you seen many camels around here?… it is about a reality people can relate to, a daily life they know, an urban landscape they can identify, not a cleaned up, orientalist version of themselves.”

Then I saw Burnout, the last part of his trilogy after Casanegra (2009) and Zero (2012). Again, the Casablancais are the focus of this film, but, rather than showing them in a ghettoized fashion, along separate destinies, Lakhmari decides to have them cross one another’s paths. Although some critics in Morocco have marveled at how lushly the white city is portrayed, I tend to disagree: Casablanca is shot mostly in interiors, and/or mostly at night, as the camera follows the various characters whose itineraries intersect. The film is not about Casablanca’s wide cityscape but rather focuses on the pointed intersections Casablanca may provide for people from the top 1% (Ines, the manager of an art gallery and her husband Jad; a rich artist; a corrupt politician on the Islamist side of the spectrum) to bump into the shrinking middle-class (a student in medical school struggling to make ends meet) and the poor class of the street shoe shiners (a motley crew of kids hired by a man in love with a one-legged woman who can never find work).

If it is about Casablanca, then it is about how the economical capital of Morocco allows its infinitely socially layered population to circulate and at times bump into one another. As a result, unpredictable encounters can happen in the city, some of them violent (the student and the politician, a kid and his so-called “uncle”), some of them magical. Among the latter, Ayoub, the shoeshine boy (played by Ilyas el Jihani, L’Orchestre des aveugles, Mohamed Mouftakir, 2015) meets Jad, the rich man whose father frustrated his dream of becoming a car racer.

These uneasy temporary joining of characters are filmed straight on, resulting in drama or humor (there is a bitter-sweet hilarious scene in a restaurant where the waiter describes the menu in perfect Nouvelle Cuisine French to a befuddled, darija-speaking audience of first-timers used to entirely different food and places). The image is sleek, very clear, the close ups on Jad’s facial scar, on the shoeshine boys‘ dirty skin and clothes, on a beggar’s nails black with grime are detailed, almost hyper-realistic. Lakhmari is clearly intent on showing us the gaping differences between people sharing the same spot with ruthless clarity and from as close up as possible: this is not a view from afar. As a result, we, as viewers, do not experience a panoramic view of the city from a protected moucharabieh: we can almost smell the urine and the sweat in the slums, and we feel the pain of Aida as she screams.

Some of Lakhmari’s themes and images from the previous two films are still present here: women are tough; men are violent, abusive; there is yet another impotent man (this time not old but middle-aged) and the character is slowly becoming crippled. This time, however, he will not die during the filmic narrative…

Obviously, Lakhmari does not want to hide his truth and does not want Moroccans to be tourists in their own landscape. Yet, in the end, you leave the theater with the laughter of Ayoub and Jad in your ears – perhaps a sliver of hope.

Florence Martin

Shakespeare in Casablanca by Sonia Terrab (60 minutes, 2016)

8 October 2017Casablanca, Festival, Moroccan Cinema, TransnationalStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

The International Women’s Film Festival in Salé offers three types of competition: feature length fiction; fiction shorts; documentaries. The latter is rich in works from all over the world and the Moroccan entry is no exception.

Shakespeare à Casablanca is profoundly Casablancais: coproduced by Nabil Ayouch (Ali’n Productions) and Moroccan TV (2M), it follows a theater troupe through the streets of Casablanca as the director and actors prepare the staging of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The film is an adaptation on multiple levels: first the play had to be translated from English to the local version of spoken Arabic, Darija (on three different levels, we are told: the darija of yore, Casablanca’s variations, the darija of today’s youth), then it had to be understood, staged and rehearsed for present times in Casablanca. For that purpose, the work was done in partnership with its potential audience. The resulting documentary is a type of “making of” of the play: how does one film the production of the play from start to finish (along, predictably enough, three acts: Beginning of the Summer; Mid-Summer; Night of the Show)? How does one go from Shakespeare’s multi-leveled fantasy to Casablanca’s 21^st century reality? The film therefore follows the actors asking people on the street how they would react to the story of star-crossed lovers whose parents forbid them to marry and who decide to flee to the forest. What would you do in that situation, they ask?

The main part of the filmic narrative becomes a fabulous call-and-response between curious passers-by and the probing actors on the streets of Casablanca, thus re-enacting in contemporary times Shakespeare’s play within the play structure in the Dream. In a hilarious scene, one man disagrees with the choice of the forest as an escape route: the lovers should retreat to the sea, to the beach, he repeats this with forceful conviction. Another steps in, addresses the male actor and demonstrates that he needs to project more assurance in order to convince his beloved’s father that his lover is his, and no one else’s. “You need to be more self-confident! You are not good at this! I would marry her! She would follow me everywhere!” Completely taken by his own acting, he ends up in a space that unites Shakespeare’s play and Casa’s reality, as he continues his dialogue with the actor and predicts: “you will marry her, and she will have your son but she will call him Fayçal [his own name], so taken is she with me, with how strong-willed I am!”

Along the way, the troupe asks people what love means. They avoid the bourgeois districts of Casablanca (e.g. the Twin Towers), preferring to interact with the people of poor neighbourhoods. What does love mean? What are the words for it in Darija? The translator mentions houb (love) and z’hou (desire, passion); a taxi driver talks about terms of endearment learned in childhood (e.g. “my little liver”). Between modesty and shame, love is hard to articulate. A young woman states that Moroccans will not and cannot talk about love.

In one of the most moving scenes, actors are asked, early in the process, to talk about a joy of love and a pain of love. Each actor tells his or her story in turn. A young man with sparkling eyes fervently describes the happiness he felt with the beloved young woman to whom he confided everything. Suddenly, his face veiled with sadness, and in an altered voice, he manages to state that the love story had finished. The camera lingers on his face twitching with pain: so moved is he that he can no longer articulate a word. After a silent while, he finally screams.

In the end, the play is staged in an empty cathedral in front of an audience, for free. As the camera films the faces of the people watching the old British bard’s complex play in Darija in today’s Morocco, there is a rare cinematic moment of grace.

Florence Martin

Berinale: Hicham Lasri’s Headbang Lullaby

11 March 2017Berlinale, Casablanca, CCM, Moroccan CinemaCasablanca, CCM, cinema, Moroccan CinemaStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

For the third successive year, Moroccan director Hicham Lasri found himself being welcomed by festival audiences in Berlin, as his fifth feature film, Headbang Lullaby (2016) – following Starve Your Dog in 2016 and The Sea is Behind in 2015 – made its world premiere in the Panorama Special section of the 2017 Berlinale. The film has also been screened this past week at the National Film Festival in Tangiers and is a Moroccan-French co-production that also befitted from funding from the Doha Film Institute (Qatar).

It is worth dwelling for a moment on just what a significant achievement this is. There can be few contemporary filmmakers from anywhere in the world whose work has appeared in three successive editions of the Berlinale. The fact that Lasri has become a regular in the Panorama section of one of world’s most important film festivals is testament to his originality, energy and creative vision as an emerging Moroccan auteur; factors that undoubtedly play well with cinephile festival audiences. This is especially true of the Panorama section of the Berlinale, which, by the festival’s own admission, aims to ‘offer insights on new directions in art house cinema’ and where auteur films such as Lasri’s traditionally form the heart of the progamme.

However, the frequency of Lasri’s recent appearances at the Berlianle is also more than that. It is an indication of how his particular style of low-budget, auteur-led production allows him to move rapidly from development to production and post-production in the time that other filmmakers are still agonizing over the first draft of their screenplay. Given how rare Lasri’s considerable success at the Berlinale over the past three years has been, it is surprising that he has not received more recognition for this achievement either within Morocco or from the CCM. There was no mention, for example (or none that I could see) of Lasri’s success at the Moroccan stand run by the CCM in the European Film Market in Berlin, whereas other national film agency stands in the market were falling over themselves to highlight the success of their national filmmakers at the festival. One possible explanation for this could have to do with the fact that Lasri was controversially denied the final tranche of funding (worth more than 1 million MAD) of the avance sur recettes, because the final proposed edit of the film was – according to the communication to the director from the CCM – deemed to have been too far removed (“especially in terms of the quality of production”) from the project as it was originally submitted to the commission for the avance sur recettes. [For more information on this: click here].

The screening of Headbang Lullaby that I attended in a cinema just off Postdamer Platz, at the centre of the festival site, was enthusiastically received by a near-capacity crowd and followed by a Q&A with the director and members of the cast. Headbang Lullaby continues the experimentation with form and style as well as the concern with recent Moroccan history found in Lasri’s earlier works, maintaining the (by now characteristic) frenetic energy of the mobile camera combined with striking composition. His work is also reminiscent of one of the greatest of all African filmmakers, Djibril Diop Mambety, who chose to apply his distinctive creative style to scenarios where magical realism and the surreal or absurd collide with the everyday struggles and political realities facing ordinary and often forgotten members of African society. The main difference, I would say, between the two directors is that Lasri is less successful in achieving the emotional connection with the characters that was always present in Mambety’s films.

In fairness to Lasri, however, in Headbang Lullaby this distanciation from the main character is partly the point. Daoud, a world-weary policeman who sustained a head injury during the bread riots of 1981, has been left with a metal plate in his head as a result of the injury and a neurological condition, which means he is unable to register emotion. A few years after the injury and set against a backdrop of Morocco’s famous but unexpected victory over Portugal in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, Daoud is sent on a mission to guard an architecturally elaborate but seemingly pointless bridge over a highway that separates two small villages, whose inhabitants are openly hostile towards one another. The pretext of Daoud guarding the bridge is to maintain order between the villagers as Hassan II and his entourage are expected to travel on the road. This information has been transformed by the local rumour mill into the ‘fact’ that Hassan II has the express intention of visiting both villages, thus causing excitement amongst the villagers and hurried preparations to welcome the king’s arrival.

In cinematic terms, the film’s use of colour (the brightly coloured plastic ribbons on top of the bridge that fly in the wind), camera movement, composition and strange/extreme camera angles, render the mundane and functional space of the bridge as a surreal, almost psychedelic frontier between the neighbouring villages – a point of conflict and unexpected contact between Daoud and the locals he comes into contact with.

TRAILER: click here.

Whilst maintaining Lasri’s interest in mining the more painful aspects of Morocco’s recent past, whose impact and effects continue to resonate today, the film is nonetheless interspersed with moments of physical comedy and lighter humour than that which tends to be found in his earlier films. As Lasri acknowledged in the Q&A following the festival screening, it was important for him to allow his characters the ability to look up; to raise their heads and acknowledge the vast blue sky above them – refusing their status as downtrodden and atomized victims of history or society and embracing the possibilities of forging meaningful connections on a human and societal level. The final moments of Headbang Lullaby thus allow for a glimpse of genuine community amongst different sections of Moroccan society (albeit presented in allegorical form) and the possibility of reconciliation and moving beyond the divisive violence of the past.

Ultimately, as one reviewer at the Berlinale noted, for all of Headbang Lullaby’s visual inventiveness and creativity, the narrative’s ‘lack of clear focus and opaque message might prove a challenge for wider audiences’. There is also a question as to how far local Moroccan audiences will find Lasri’s auteurist approach accessible, presuming that they are able to see the film in Moroccan cinemas. However, as the endorsement for the third year running from the Berlinale shows, and judging by the apparently positive response to the film at the National Festival (according to other members of the TMC team who were able to attend Tangiers), in Hicham Lasri, Moroccan cinema has a dynamic and experimental auteur whose style seems, unfortunately, to be the exception that proves the rule. It is to be hoped that the CCM and Moroccan cinema more generally find the structures and identify the funding that can support the emergence of a new generation of Moroccan filmmakers who share Lasri’s creativity and originality and can find a space both at home and abroad for their work to be recognized.

Will Higbee

The Uncanny Familiarity of Casablanca

12 October 2016Casablanca, Tourism, TransnationalCasablanca, Cinema EmpireStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

cinema empire Casa — Cinema Empire, Casablanca

Riding the train from Rabat to Casablanca for the first time, my eyes are glued to the train window, even if the latter has seen better and cleaner days: a yellowish haze filters the screen of the shifting landscape. Past the station of Mohammedia, the surroundings change from industrial wasteland to “residential”: the first bidonville appears (the term first appeared in French to qualify the slums of Casablanca, as the city sprawled from a mere 20,000 in 1907 to today’s 2.5 million and counting), and will be followed by many more, huddled along garbage dumps where the refuse of the neighboring urban centers is piled high and oozes past the main heap in all directions. My surprise comes from a feeling of déjà vu: I recognize the slums of Nabil Ayouch’s Horses of God, of Yassine Fennane’s Karyan Bollywood. I register the patchwork of roofs sprouting with satellite dishes in haphazard rows like invasive weeds.

Once in the city, riding a petit taxi to my first appointment downtown, I soon find myself in one of these famous Casablanca traffic jams: noisy, utterly chaotic, but again not startling, a pale version of those in Noureddine Lakhmari’s Zero (I do get slightly concerned, however, when my taxi abruptly jerks to the right to follow the shiny black Audi that has just inaugurated a third lane in a two-lane boulevard).

I reach my destination near the Twin Center and, upon seeing the twin towers of Casablanca, realize with a twinge of disappointment that Bensaïdi’s What a Wonderful World had made them taller, more foreboding, whiter! My filmic familiarity with them now morphs into a bizarre nostalgia for a place that never was: a filmic fantasy achieved with a bright filter, larger than life.

On my way to another appointment, I pass restaurants and cafés that spring out of Nabil Ayouch’s Ali Zawa, Noureddine Lakhmari’s Casanegra, and finally What a Wonderful World, the café in which Kamel waits for Kenza. At that precise moment, as the taxi is going around the circle in front of the – by now for me mythical – brasserie, it starts to rain heavy drops, vertically, very much like the selective cloud that empties itself exclusively over the two protagonists in WWW.

The cinematic bubble of Casablanca has taken over the physical Casablanca in which I find myself. Puzzled by this form of cine-tourism to which I have unwittingly fallen prey, I nonetheless keep identifying sights from film and film from sights, at each turn in the city. It will take several more ventures to Casa to reel the films back and start to see the city afresh, no longer a movie set…

Florence Martin