Category Archives: Transnational

CALL and RESPONSE: the transnational reach of the Moroccan music documentary

26 November 2017Africa in Motion, Festival, Moroccan Cinema, TransnationalStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

For the second year running, the TMC research project sponsored a panel at the Africa in Motion film festival. This year the focus was Moroccan music documentaries and we were honoured to welcome two of the most important directors who have worked in this area: Izza Génini and Ahmed El Maanouni. The Africa in Motion festival has always tried, wherever possible, to offer its audiences more than a simple screening of a film.

The TMC team were therefore delighted for the opportunity to develop a ‘Call and Response’ workshop on Moroccan music documentary, including live music from the talented Moroccan musician Omar Bin Afif.

The workshop began with a presentation from TMC project Co-Investigator Prof Florence Martin, providing insights into the cultural significance and diversity of music in Moroccan culture, as well as the role of directors such as El Maanouni and Génini in preserving this rich musical heritage through their documentaries. The presence of Omar meant that those participating in the workshop were fortunate enough to have a live demonstration of the various styles of music discussed by Flo.

Following a break for mint tea and Moroccan sweets and pastries, also prepared by Omar – is there no end to this man’s talents?!?! – the audience were then treated to an ‘in-conversation’ with the filmmakers, chaired by TMC Principal Investigator Prof Will Higbee. Both Izza and Ahmed spoke of their passion for the music in their films, their professional collaboration (Izza was also the producer of El Maanouni’s cult classic Trances) as well as the power of music and cinema to cross cultures and engage audiences. A memorable afternoon for all present ended with an extended performance by Omar.

Later that day, the TMC research team along with the filmmakers moved on to the Filmhouse for a double bill of Moroccan music documentaries, followed by a Q&A.

The first film to be screened was the short documentary Aïta (1987), directed by Izza Genini. Aïta is the first film in a ten-part series of documentaries on Moroccan music made by Izza between 1987-1992 entitled Maroc: corps et ame / Morocco Body and Soul. The film’s title refers to a style of popular music in Morocco, associated with the Cheikat – female troubadours who travel across Morocco singing at festivals and moussems, combining song and dance to recount epic events from Moroccan history and turning their cries and sways into emotionally-charged songs and performances. Aïta follows Fatna Bent el Hocine – one of the most popular and celebrated Cheikhats in the history of Moroccan music. The film itself is structured around performances by the singers and musicians at the Moussem of Moulay Abdullah – a traditional tribal gathering involving horse-racing, feasts, music and dancing. However, the moments that Génini captures of the singers between performances (off-stage, relaxing, rehearsing) are as important to the film as the performances themselves.

Originally a distributor and producer of feature films, Genini found herself making documentaries as a way to explore her Moroccan past. In this way, the documentary project of which Aïta was a part is an important act of safeguarding a collective cultural memory – a means of archiving Moroccan music and cultural traditions. However, for Genini, a Moroccan Jew who left Morocco as a young woman to study in Paris, the city she made her home, the music documentaries are also an intensely personal creative act; a way for her to connect with the country of her birth and her own cultural heritage.

The second film on the TMC double bill was Trances, the feature-length documentary directed by Ahmed El Maanouni and produced by Izza Génini that has achieved cult status in Morocco and internationally since its release in the early 1980s. The film follows the massively popular Moroccan group Nass el Ghiwane, who combined the rock and roll swagger of The Rolling Stones with a deep understanding and respect of the diverse musical and poetic heritage of Morocco.

Trances is the second feature-length film directed by Ahmed el Maanouni (he also worked as a cinematographer) and followed the international success of Alyam Alyam (1978) which was the first Moroccan film to be represented at Cannes and win the Un Certain Regard prize at the Director’s Fortnight, as well as many awards at festivals across the world. In a career spanning almost 40 years, Ahmed El Maanouni has established himself as one of the most important Moroccan filmmakers, and a passionate advocate and supporter of Moroccan cinema and a new generation of Moroccan filmmakers, working across documentary and fiction, most recently releasing the popular comedy Fadma (2017) for which he was given the award for best director at the National Film Festival in Tangier earlier this year.

Trances mixes concert footage (from Carthage in Tunisia; Agadir and Essaouira in Morocco; and Paris), filmed interviews with the band and black-and-white archival footage. However, the film is much more than a concert film, as it shows the cultural and socio-political importance of the group Nass el Ghiwane to a generation of young Moroccans – as well as the way that the group turned away from the often-romantic musical influences of the Eastern part of the Arab world to focus on the diverse sounds, instruments and musical and poetic traditions of Morocco. Crucially, the songs were sung in Darija (Moroccan Arabic) to ecstatic young audiences, who could relate not only to the message of the music and its traditions but also the language in which it was delivered.

The film has been a huge success internationally, garnering plaudits and attention at festivals across the world. As such it also had the honour of being the first film selected by Martin Scorsese to be restored as part of his World Cinema Foundation / World Cinema project. Trances captures the excitement and energy of Nass el Ghiwane in concert as well as exploring the diverse origins of the band’s music, their desire to re-engage a new generation of Moroccans to a music and poetry from which they may have felt disconnected, as well as exploring the social political resonances of the band’s music. While Nass el Ghiwane may have often played down suggestions of political messages in their work, the power of the images and editing of Ahmed’s film, juxtaposing the band’s music with contemporary footage of Morocco and archival material from the colonial period show the socio-political resonance that the band obviously had for its young audience.

Speaking eloquently at the Q&A after the film, both Izza Genini and Ahmed el Maanouni considered the impact of the film on their careers as well as the cultural and political significance of Trances in the history of Moroccan cinema. Izza told us how she worked with Maanouni on the film, about a band she had been a fan of for a long time, and Maanouni confirmed the continued importance of the band and Izza’s work. Maanouni finished by suggesting that, in selecting the film as the first to be restored and distributed via the World Cinema Project, Scorsese had offered him a ‘gift’. I would look at this a different way, and suggest the gift was in fact offered by Ahmed and Izza to Scorsese and audiences across the world who, like the appreciative crowd in the Filmhouse, have embraced this key work of Moroccan cinema – arguably the first Moroccan film with a truly global reach – ensuring that more than three decades on the film continues to have the power to move and engage audiences.

A group photo with the TMC and AiM teams with Izza and Ahmed

The TMC project team gratefully acknowledges the support of the AHRC for making this Call and Response event possible. We are also grateful to our project partners, the Africa in Motion festival, for allowing us to put on the events as part of the film festival. Thanks too to Omar Bin Afif for bringing the music alive at the workshop and to Dr Stefanie Van de Peer for her organisational skills and curatorial expertise in programming this event.

Will Higbee

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

The African road movies of Khouribga

29 September 2017Festival, Kourigba, Moroccan Cinema, Transnationalblog, festival, MoroccoStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

20 September 2017Festival, Moroccan Cinema, Transnationalblog, festival, MoroccoStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

This year marked the 20^th 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

Moroccan Cinema Uncut Conference: Day 1

4 December 2016Conference, Marrakech, TransnationalStefanie Elvire Van De Peer

TMC’s first international conference “Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Local Perspectives, Transnational Dialogues” (Marrakech, 4-7 December 2016) kicked off with warm words of welcome by Principal Investigator Will Higbee (University of Exeter) and Co-investigator Florence Martin (Goucher College). They welcomed all the delegates, who have travelled from different parts of the world to give papers, keynote addresses and attend the Marrakech International Film Festival (2-10 December). Will also thanked the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for making this conference and project possible in the first place. The Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM) and its director Sarim Fassi-Fihri were also thanked for their help.

The conference kicked off with a keynote address by Kevin Dwyer, an established anthropologist and specialist of Moroccan cinema and Maghrebi media cultures. Dwyer surveyed the landscape of documentary production in Morocco and Tunisia. He started by revealing his own personal and scholarly journey as an anthropologist of rural Morocco and human rights activism. This trajectory has led him to work on Moroccan cinema over the last twenty years. After a discussion of key questions around the difficulty of defining documentary due to its immense diversity and limitless subject focus, Dwyer argued that the documentary is gaining in visibility and influence in both Tunisia and Morocco despite enormous political and financial obstacles as well as considerable challenges in relation to distribution. The 2011 uprisings have helped documentary filmmaking to gain new momentum due to its urgency and immediacy.

In Morocco, the CCM has supported documentary filmmaking from the country’s independence in 1956. Most Moroccan films until the 1980s were largely shorts, made in the service of nation-building. CCM support continues today through financial aid to filmmakers every year in spite of the prominence of feature films among CCM-funded and internationally co-produced films. The institution has also supported documentary film festivals in Morocco such as FIDADOC in Agadir. The second public TV channel 2M has also supported the Moroccan documentary through production support and granting documentaries prime time on television. However, the institutional support for the Moroccan documentary remains insufficient, and documentary filmmakers have often complained about not feeling supported to the same extent as those making feature films. Dwyer also pointed out the existence of Moroccan documentaries produced outside the CCM and 2M circuits. For example, Guerilla Cinema has produced many online-distributed films by Nadir Bouhmouch in recent years.

Moroccan and Tunisian documentary films have also faced problems such as legal issues in the case of Mohamed Ulad Muhand’s Hercule contre Hermès (هرقل ضد هيرمس, Morocco 2012) and Nadia El Fani’s Laïcité Inch’Allah! (اللائكية، إن شاء الله!, Tunisia 2011). Dwyer also dwelt on similar problems faced by documentary filmmakers and anthropologists such as the delicate issue of how both relate to the subject of their inquiry. This relationship poses many ethical questions and can lead to censorship in various cases.

The Q&A session following the first keynote address pushed the discussion in new directions such as the emergence and role of a powerful player like Al Jazeera Documentary. This Qatari TV channel has sponsored and screened ever-larger numbers of Maghrebi documentary films or international productions on the Maghreb. Other comments and questions drew attention to the rise of transnational Moroccan-Israeli documentaries, which focus on the history and present of Moroccan Jews in Israel, Morocco and beyond.

The first panel of day 1 consisted of a paper by Abdelaziz Amraoui (Cadi Ayyad University, Safi). He dwelt on the attractive nature of Morocco to international filmmakers. This movement started almost at the same time that cinema was invented in the late 19th century. Amaraoui focused on how these films willingly and unwillingly have led to what he calls cine-tourism in Morocco. Many international tourists come to Morocco to visit, among others, film locations and sets especially in Ouarzazate, which is often called the African Hollywood. Internationally renowned films like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Babel (2006) were partly or entirely made in Ouarzazate. However, the Moroccan tourism ministry does not seem to care about such tourism. A lot remains to be done to cash in on this desire by organising themed visits and other film-focused trips for national and international (film) tourists.

The afternoon session of the conference started with a keynote address by Hamid Aidouni (Université Abdelmalek Saadi, Tetouan). He started with some general remarks about Moroccan cinema in which he tried to debunk some myths about some films and filmmakers. He dwelt mostly on the films of Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011), one of the most famous and experimental Moroccan film directors despite the large interest he has generated in recent years. Aidouni borrowed Ali Safi’s phrase “Bouanani School” in Moroccan cinema. Bouanani was a unique filmmaker and talented artist and poet. His films like Mémoire 14 (1971) and Mirage (1979) are revered among large sections of Moroccan film scholars. They are visual poems. Aidouni showed clips from some Bouanani works. He also played clips from Mohamed Afifi’s equally experimental documentary Retour en Agadir (1967). It was filmed not long after the Agadir earthquake in 1960. Afifi and Bouanani are two of the great fathers of Moroccan cinema whom new generations of filmmakers have yet to kill for this (trans)national cinema to be reborn.

The conference’s last panel today was devoted to women in Moroccan cinema. The first speaker Nadir Bouhmouch (Moroccan filmmaker and activist) focused on what he called the “male condition” in Moroccan cinema. He read many Moroccan films through the lens of gender, class and ideology in “the New Urban Cinema” (NUC, Bahmad 2012, 2013). NUC was taken to task by Bouhmouch for its negligence of female characters despite its claim to social realism. He argued that these films focus on male characters, particularly degenerate patriarchs. The next paper by Zakia Salime (Rutgers University) analysed two documentary films on Moroccan youth cultures and women’s suffering and resistance in a patriarchal society. Farida Benlyazid’s Casanayda (2007) chronicles the renaissance of Moroccan youth cultures in music, lifestyle and cultural life in the 2000s. The film focuses on the city of Casablanca where Morocco’s first and largest urban music festival L’Boulevard takes place every year until 2016 when financial issues forced the organisers to cancel this year’s edition while working on new ways to finance the festival and guarantee its future. Hind Bensari’s documentary 475: Trêve de silence (2013) gives voice to many female victims of the infamous and even since amended Article 475 in Moroccan criminal law which allowed rapists to marry their victims so as to escape justice. The film also brings in some legal scholars who reveal the dark side of this law inherited from the colonial period. Said Chemlal presented the last paper on the panel and dwelt on the representation of Amazigh women in Najis Nejjar’s feature film Alen Zwanin / Dry Eyes (2003). This controversial film foregrounds the suffering of women in a remote village in the Moroccan Middle Atlas mountains. The film explicitly and sometimes unwittingly reveals the long suffering and marginalization of Amazigh people in their homeland.

The conference attracted a great deal of interest from Moroccan and other media outlets that are in Marrakech to cover the film festival, the largest of its kind in Morocco and the region. Dr Jamal Bahmad, one of the TMC team members, was interviewed for 20 minutes by Moroccan national radio this evening. This and other media will continue to cover our conference with more interviews and news stories due over the next few days. Stay tuned!

Jamal Bahmad