Category Archives: Moroccan Cinema

Noureddine Lakhmari’s Burnout: the anti moucharabieh cinema!

Casablanca, Moroccan Cinema, Tourism, ,

 

On set – Burnout

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.”

Poster Burnout (2017, Lakhmari)

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.

Noureddine Lakhmari

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)

Casablanca, Festival, Moroccan Cinema, Transnational

 

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 in Casablanca

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 21st 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?

Call-and-Response

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

The African road movies of Khouribga

Festival, Kourigba, Moroccan Cinema, Transnational, ,

 

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!

Florence Martin

A Festival Goes to Jail…. Khouribga (September 2017)

Festival, Moroccan Cinema, Transnational, ,

 

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.

Florence Martin

Animated Networks in Morocco

Animation, CCM, Moroccan Cinema

 

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