Category Archives: Moroccan Cinema

Roundtable Report: Chamber of Moroccan Film Producers (Tangier, 4 March 2017)

5 May 2017CCM, Cinemas, Marrakech, Moroccan Cinema, TangiersStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jamal Bahmad

So what about the matriarchs?

14 March 2017CCM, Moroccan Cinema, TangiersStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

Note 1 on the 18^th National Film Festival in Tangier (3-11 March, 2017)

Just back from the 18^th 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

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

Day 3 at TMC: Minorities on Moroccan Screens

6 December 2016Conference, Marrakech, Moroccan CinemaStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

The third day of the TMC conference started misty and atmospherically, with limited views outside the windows but all the more insightful views inside the conference room. Bright and early (for some at least), today got underway with a four-speaker panel on sexualities and trauma: we heard from Lowry Martin, Valerie Orlando, Kaya Davies Hayon and Jimia Boutouba.

Lowry started the panel with a queer studies approach to Salvation Army (Abdallah Taïa), which was met with very lively discussions: where is queer studies situated when we talk about Moroccan cinema, or cinema from Morocco that crosses borders (in this case between Morocco and Switzerland)? Do we need to make distinctions between a Muslim Arab world and a Christian Europe? Valerie talked about Mohamed Mouftakir’s film Pegase, a dark psychological thriller about a traumatised young woman who is the victim of her father’s lust for power and goes through life as a boy in order to safeguard his lineage. Her sexuality is denied, and as she undergoes psychiatric treatment it transpires that she is also the victim of pedophilia. The paper sparked questions about deviant sexualities and how film deals with silences and gaps in Morocco’s past. Kaya then looked at The Sleeping Child by Yasmine Kassari, in a phenomenological analysis of women’s bodies and the empowerment of spiritualism. A story about migration, where women are left behind, The Sleeping Child ultimately reveals a transnational feminist aesthetic that returns also in other Maghrebi women’s films. Jimia, lastly, changed the mood in the room as the sun came out, with a discussion of comedy Number One by Zakia Tahiri. The contextualization of the film nevertheless showed that a Moroccan masculinity is experienced as being under threat, and that ultimately this masculinity is a performance. The male protagonist in the film becomes undone, not in the sense that he is un-manned, but he is un-mastered. This comic film has social concerns that are just as urgent and important as the more serious films discussed earlier.

The roundtable on Berber film and film festivals that followed was organized by Lucy McNair and Habiba Boumlik from CUNY, who invited Hamid Aïdouni, Jamal Bahmad, the organisers of the Fameck Arab film festival, and Amazigh filmmaker Ahmed Baidou (known for his film Addour) onto the panel. They discussed issues of programming Amazigh films for festivals and issues of translating cultures as well as languages. Important questions were asked, such as: what is Amazigh cinema, and where is it located? Which language is Amazigh cinema in, and how does it speak to audiences around the world? We learned that one must think of Amazigh culture as a horizontal and as a vertical experience: in the past it reached from the Maghreb to Egypt, and from north of Morocco to its deep south. The most significant and welcome conclusion of this roundtable was that as scholars, filmmakers, producers, and distributors, we must all embrace the diversity within Morocco and within its cinema, and that it is very urgent to do so indeed.

The last panel of the day returned to the theme of women in film, discussing in particular the circulation of films, and their distribution circuits in Morocco, France and the EU at large. Patricia Caillé and Karine Prévoteau showed us their findings of years of research into why some films manage to reach wide audiences and others disappear into forgetfulness, as they get lost in the maze of film, DVD, VHS and TV distribution worldwide. Pertinent questions about online platforms and digital disruption were asked in their discussion. Touria Khannous closed off today by discussing Rock the Casbah (Leila Marrakchi) and The Sleeping Child (Yasmine Kassari), and in particular the difficult if not impossible balance of being an outsider and an insider at the same time. Might that be the ultimate transnational condition?

The highlight at the festival today was the screening of Oliver Lax’s Mimosas: a transnational production between Spain, France, Qatar and Morocco that combines elements of the road movie and the western. There were long queues to get into the cinema, which was filled to capacity. People clearly enjoyed themselves, and the Moroccan audiences may have gotten more out of the film than we did, as with certain scenes in the film, people were laughing at the nickname of the central character (tête de poêle), and we as Western audiences missed some of the jokes. Something got lost in translation, or cultural references were perhaps obscure for us. Such is the experience of a transnational spectator: it makes you wonder, explore and dig deeper…

Roundtable Discussion on Western Sahara at Africa in Motion

14 November 2016Africa in Motion, Moroccan CinemaStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

The Transnational Moroccan Cinema (TMC) project is very proud to have been able to collaborate with the Africa in Motion (AiM) film festival in Scotland to screen films from Morocco and abroad dealing with the disputed Western Sahara territory on screen. The festival’s main goal has always been to bring the best of African cinema to UK audiences in a pan-African spirit that looks at both aesthetically beautiful as well as what we call ‘necessary’, or ‘urgent’ films. Since its inception, AiM has been committed to programming a diverse range of films from across the African continent, including those from the Maghreb – another reason why the TMC project has been keen to collaborate with the festival. We hope to sponsor a further panel at the festival next year before the project’s final symposium at AiM in 2018, which will include a programme of films showcasing the best of contemporary Moroccan cinema curated by the TMC project team.

At its core, the AiM festival endeavours to open up eyes, minds and dialogues, to ensure that the underrepresentation of Africa on our cinema screens is addressed. This was equally the idea behind the TMC team’s organisation of the double bill of a Moroccan epic historical feature and an issue-based activist documentary at AiM 2016 on Sunday 6 November. We screened Al Massira: The Green March (2016) by Youssef Britel in conversation with Iara Lee’s Life is Waiting: Referendum and Resistance in Western Sahara (2015). Both films commemorate the landmark event which took place on on 6 November 1975, when 350,000 Moroccan citizens heeded the call of King Hassan II to march into Western Sahara to reclaim it from the Spanish coloniser, and the 41 years of conflict and stalemate since then. These are two diametrically opposed films, and the idea behind programming them together was precisely to show both sides of the question and to enable a dialogue between the films and audiences.

The screening of both films together followed by a panel of experts allowed the audience to get fresh insights into the questions addressed by Al Massira and Life is Waiting. The panel included professor Noé Mendelle, documentary filmmaker who has worked in Western Sahara on her film Al Khadra: Poet of the Desert (2012) and director of Scottish Documentary Institute; Will Higbee, Professor of Film Studies at the University of Exeter and Principal Investigator of the TMC project; Ali Bahaijoub, author of Western Sahara Conflict (2010) and Vice-Chair of the British-Moroccan Society; Alice Wilson, a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex and author of Sovereignty in Exile: A Saharan Liberation Movement Governs (2016); and Jamal Bahmad, TMC Postdoctoral Fellow specialising in contemporary Moroccan film cultures.

As Al Massira shows, in an epic historical frame, Moroccans forced the Spanish to leave Western Sahara without engaging all parts of Sahrawi society. Life is Waiting, a documentary about 41 years of conflict and stalled negotiations, shows the devastating aftermath of conflict and disputes over land in a post-colonial context. Both films carry partisan elements, but they speak directly to each other and work together to enable a conversation between the different sides of the story.

It is worth noting that the Sahara question has started to generate an increasing number of (mostly documentary) films in Morocco and overseas in recent years. However, as the panel discussion after the screenings showed, for a variety of reasons and due to the highly complex and charged nature of the Western Sahara debate, Moroccan filmmakers have tended to focus their attention on other contemporary socio-political issues, away from the Western Sahara. Nevertheless, as the TMC panel indicated, this is an issue worth following and questioning on screen, and a necessary dialogue needs to continue between all sides in debates such as the one held at the Africa in Motion Film Festival.

Jamal Bahmad, Will Higbee, and Stefanie Van de Peer