Emaj Magazine

A week ago the Moroccan Film Days, jointly organized by the research centre Zentrum Moderner Orient and the Arsenal cinema in Berlin, drew to a close. Nine films, four days, four filmmakers present and an audience bursting with questions. Some reflections:

Berlin, on a breezy Monday morning. Waiting for an appointment at the Moroccan embassy, a flyer catches my eye: “Change and diversity – Moroccan film days”. Fantastic! The fact that such an event would be supported by the Kingdom’s embassy could well provide an entry point into some critical thinking on the state of post-colonial Maghrebi filmmaking, but that is for another time. Sure enough there are not many opportunities outside the festival circus to catch such productions, so four cinema-intense days lie ahead. Intense, but inevitably selective. As Sonja Hegasy, one of the convenors, explains: the attempt is to cover a breadth of topics and artistic approaches in contemporary Moroccan cinema, with the important caveat of wanting the themes covered to relate to Moroccan society. This is understandable, but does not easily square with the universal aspirations of contemporary filmmakers. Questions of definitions and categorization ended up being a focal point of the festival debates : what is Moroccan cinema? Is there a “duty” on the part of Moroccan filmmakers to portray their country? And how does a migratory background condition one’s “cinematic nationality”?

But for the moment the buzzing multilingual crowd has taken seat at the Arsenal and the curtain lifts on Les yeux secs. With few words and intense pictures, Narjiss Nejjar paints a story of love, prostitution, rural isolation, Berber culture and the struggle for breaking path-dependency.  An apt opening, and poignant example of the merging of fiction and documentary formats, Les yeux secs left me wondering what statement lie in not saying something. As ready as the producer Noufissa Sbaï was to praise the socially empowering aspect of the production on the Berber communities featured in the film, the (non-expert) audience found itself left to their own devices to place the film’s content in its complex socio-economic, cultural and historic context. A context without which the film becomes just another love story with an exotic twist to it. But hang on, is that not sufficient?

It is not surprising that there is a latent expectation of political content in the artistic output of contemporary filmmakers, who are freer to criticise, to challenge and question than previous generations have ever been. Mohamed Chrif Tribak’s treatment of the contentions between Marxist and Islamist movements in the early 1990s in Le temps des camarades caters to that, as does Nabil Ayouch’s Une minutes des soleil en moins, an artistically explosive thriller whose offensive confrontation of topics ranging from child abuse to corruption has led to its ban from Moroccan screens. The documentary Nos Lieux interdits (Leïla Kilani) portrays the work of Moroccan’s Truth Commission that was charged with investigating human rights abuses committed under Hassan II. Kilani engages humanely with the personal narratives of torture, abduction, shame and marginalization, catching voices that are sidelined from Moroccan mainstream media, let alone international attention. But the film is also loudly silent on the more touchy issues surrounding political prisoners and the heavy criticisms levelled against the Commission’s practises, communicating again as much in what it says as it does in that that remains unsaid.

With all the food for thought, potential for intellectual growth and development of societal space for expression and contestation inherent in critical engagements with the country’s history, Moroccan cinema is spreading its wings in many other directions. The filmmakers represented at this festival work with Hollywoodesque genre cinema (Tala Selhami’s Mirages), first-person documentary sprinkled with ethnographic episodes (Hakim Belabbes’ Fragments), fiercly witty deconstruction of the Dream Factory (Ali Essafi’s Cinema Ouarzazate), and skilful storytelling that adds Moroccan voices to the canon of internationally oriented young cinema (Swel and Imad Noury’s Les portes du paradis). Out of this program, a definite darling with the viewers (and unsurprisingly recipient of numerous awards), Belgian-Moroccan Yasmine Kassari’s L’enfant enformi best encapsulates the hope inherent in Moroccan cinema. Beautifully shot, but never airbrushing its subjects of poverty, longing, tradition and future from the perspective of those that migrants leave behind, Kassari’s work stands for the enthralling cinema that the hybridity inherent in the cultural and emotional geographies of contemporary Morocco.

While this spectrum of films eludes comparative analysis, they lend themselves to overarching questions, which the podiums discussions at the Arsenal only started to sketch out. What, then, is Moroccan cinema? How do you balance the wish for artistic expression and the desire for defining a distinct Moroccan cinematic language? How can the contours of such a language be e sketched out when a sizable share of Moroccan filmmakers are living and working abroad, defined by multicultural identity structures and cognitive environments? Which funding criteria are to be derived from tentative answers to such questions for the Centre Cinematographique Marocain (the principal funding body for Moroccan cinema, and instrumental in driving its development)?  And we have not even raised issues of minimal distribution, the disparate provision of formal film education and the role of foreign production companies.

There is much to discuss, and it is important to broach these questions, but I firmly believe that many answers will ultimately be given in audiovisual language rather than words. A culture defined by intense visuality, an immense oral history, and ever-evolving social landscapes has just begun to express through film. Film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand, that’s the beauty, the promise of cinema.  So I rest my pen with a “produce, Moroccans, produce!”