Films

Index / Activities / Films / Who Will Tell The Story? Beginnings of Documentary Film in Morocco

Who Will Tell The Story? Beginnings of Documentary Film in Morocco

From May 06, 2022 until June 17, 2022Fridays at 7:30 p.m.
MADRID
Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62) . Fridays at 7:30 p.m. Tickets on sale at the information of each session.
Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.

Casa Árabe and Cineteca are hosting during the months of May and June in Madrid the itinerant series 'Who will tell the story? Beginnings of Documentary Cinema in Morocco'. The retrospective has been curated for its 16th edition by the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival "Punto de Vista" with Omar Berrada and Ali Essafi.

Completing this retrospective is the Spanish edition of the essential book "The Seventh Gate", by filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani, which will be presented on Tuesday, May 3, at Casa Árabe's headquarters in Madrid.

“I do not claim to save Moroccan cinema by making a feature film, nor do I claim to make a masterpiece. (…) I actually proclaim my right to make bad movies, and this is not a joke. My only ambition — the ambition of all Moroccan filmmakers — is for the audience to get used to watching themselves on screen, to see their own problems being addressed and thus to be able to judge the society in which they live.”

(Ahmed Bouanani, interview with Nour-Eddine Saïl, 1974)

Ahmed Bouanani’s La Septième Porte [The Seventh Gate] finally came out in 2020, after 33 years as an unpublished manuscript. The dearth of accessible archives being an impediment to research, there are very few substantive books about Moroccan cinema. Therefore, although it was written in the 1980s, La Septième Porte remains a fundamental resource. In addition to his analytical rigor and beautiful writing, Bouanani knew most Moroccan filmmakers personally, and worked on many of their films, as an editor, advisor or script writer. Having worked at the CCM (the Moroccan Film Center) for decades, he was also familiar with the archive of European productions made during the colonial period.

The Seventh Gate narrates the transformations of cinema in Morocco —and the transformations of Morocco through cinema— from 1907 to 1986. In particular, it chronicles the struggle of filmmakers, after Independence, to liberate the country’s image from the colonial gaze. As a director himself, Bouanani was fully immersed in the questions he was formulating: how to revive cultural memory when it has been mummified by decades of colonial subjugation? How to invent an aesthetic that is relevant to its time and place, an aesthetic through which Moroccans might recognize themselves? In sum, how to decolonize the screen?

This retrospective attempts to carve a path toward the seventh gate through the lens of documentary image-making. It is the first such presentation of the beginnings of Moroccan documentary film. We show a brief taste of (French and Spanish) colonial filmmaking, before delving into the first three decades of national cinema. Taking a cue from Bouanani’s book, we offer an eclectic panorama of experiments conducted, despite censorship and limited means, by a pioneering generation of filmmakers in all parts of the country and the diaspora.

From student exercises to full-fledged features, from public commissions to highly subjective projects, these films cover a wide creative spectrum that veers between experimental joy and political impatience; lyrical poetry and meticulous ethnography; formal exploration and historical narrative. They stretch the documentary form in all directions. As Ahmed El Maanouni said about his first feature, «the ‘documentary’ label is a catch-all. All I know is that the film is not science fiction. The audience will say whether our sounds and images are true.»

After the 1970s, documentary film production in Morocco became scarce, before returning forcefully two decades later with the likes of Dalila Ennadre, Hakim Belabbès, and Ali Essafi. This recent period would deserve a retrospective of its own. In focusing on the earlier phase, our main regret is the quasi-absence of films made by women: while many women have shaped these works in invisible ways, it was only later, from the 90s on, that women directors burst on the scene.

We view this retrospective as a step in the ongoing project of recovering our cultural memory in all its rich multiplicity, and sharing it with the world. We have composed it with help and support from many friends and colleagues, most crucially Touda Bouanani and Léa Morin; as well as institutions, especially the CCM in Rabat, whose staff —in particular Tariq Khalami andi Samir Bouchaibi— went beyond the call of duty. We are very grateful to Manuel Asín and the whole Punto de Vista team for their thoughtful invitation and their support throughout the process.

Curated and notes by Omar Berrada and Ali Essafi

* Retrospective made in collaboration with Casa Árabe, the African Film Festival - FCAT, the Moroccan Film Center, Instituto Cervantes Tangier, Filmoteca Española, Cinemateca Francesa and Cinemateca Bologna/ The Film Foundation/ World Cinema.
  • Session 1. Colonial Nights

    May 06, 20227:30 p.m.
    MADRID
    Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:30 p.m. 5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
    4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper documentation. You may only receive one discount. Sales in advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m. Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card). Assigned seats with tickets. Mask use is required at all times.
    Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
    El viernes 6 de mayo tendrá lugar la primera sesión del ciclo ¿Quién contará la historia? Inicios del cine documental en Marruecos, comisariado por el Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Navarra "Punto de Vista". Entradas a la venta online. 
    In Morocco, the birth of cinema is inseparable from colonial conquest. The first cameras arrived alongside European armies and their tanks. In addition to propaganda reels documenting the invasion and its aftermath, Morocco soon became the site of a prolific film production. In it, for the most part, the natives appeared only as extras, and were excluded from access to technical or artistic training. Because of the absence of a precolonial tradition of figurative representation, decades of colonial filmmaking imposed a lasting orientalist image of the country and its people, which influenced even the way Moroccans saw themselves. For Ahmed Bouanani, the task of the first generation of Moroccan filmmakers was to recalibrate the gaze, to re-learn how to look at their fellow citizens and their native landscapes, in order to counter the hegemony of colonial representation. That is what he attempted in Mémoire 14, for instance, by literally decomposing and resequencing French propaganda reels in a way that makes them tell the story otherwise.

    Tetuán, la blanca
    Arturo Pérez Camarero
    Spain, 1943, 15 min, digital, B&W, Spanish
    Copy provided by Filmoteca Española

    La fugue de Mahmoud
    Roger Leenhardt
    France, 1952, 33 min, digital, B&W, French
    Copy provided by the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA)

    Amghar
    Mostafa Derkaoui
    Poland, 1968, 4 min, digital, B&W, silent
    Copy provided by Łódź Film School

    Mémoire 14
    Ahmed Bouanani
    Morocco, 1971, 25 min, digital, B&W, French

    Petite histoire en marge du cinématographe
    Ahmed Bouanani
    Morocco, 1973, 6 min, digital, colour, B&W, French
  • Session 2. The Country of Memory

    May 13, 20227:30 p.m.
    MADRID
    Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:30 p.m. 5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
    4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper documentation. You may only receive one discount. Sales in advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m. Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card). Assigned seats with tickets. Mask use is required at all times.
    Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
    Second session of the cycle dedicated during the months of May and June to the beginnings of documentary cinema in Morocco. The program has been curated by the International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra "Punto de vista". Buy your ticket now for this week's session. 
    No issue was more important to Ahmed Bouanani than memory. He understood early on that the unified nationalist narrative pushed by the newly independent state was just as dangerous as the distorted image imposed by the colonizers, because it marginalized too many voices. He wanted to tell history from below, to honor the human and non-human diversity of the territory he called home. This meant relying on people’s stories. It meant valuing myths and popular legends above and beyond the academic discipline of History. Despite suspicion and censorship, he would subvert public commissions in order to make films that bear witness to a truly collective memory. In Tarfaya ou la marche d’un poète, a fictional coming-of-age scenario becomes the occasion for a lively depiction of village markets and Saharan landscapes, holy shrines and storytelling circles. Bouanani was only able to make a small number of films, but his method left a mark on many filmmakers, as this program shows.

    Tarfaya ou la marche d’un poète
    Ahmed Bouanani
    Morocco, 1966, 20 min, digital, B&W, French
    Copy on loan from the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)

    Mémoire 14
    Ahmed Bouanani
    Morocco, 1971, 25 min, digital, B&W, French

    Visages de Marrakech
    Mohamed Abouelouakar
    Morocco, 1977, 35 min, digital, colour, French
    Copy on loan from the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)

    Mémoire ocre
    Daoud Aoulad Syad
    Morocco, 1991, 17 min, digital, colour-B&W, Arabic-French-English
    Copy on loan from the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)
  • Session 3. In search of Perfect Death

    May 20, 20227:30 p.m.
    MADRID
    Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:30 p.m. 5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
    4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper documentation. You may only receive one discount. Sales in advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m. Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card). Assigned seats with tickets. Mask use is required at all times.
    Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
    The third session of this cycle, dedicated to the beginnings of Moroccan documentary cinema, will take place on Friday, May 20. The selection has been curated by "Punto de Vista", International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra.
    For Forêt, shot in Aïn Leuh near Azrou, Majid Rechiche wrote a fictional script based on a true story in which a man killed his wife for a seemingly trivial reason. The film describes an individual’s alienation within a closed world. In La Septième Porte, Bouanani suggests “comparing this experiment with one that took place the same year, in Paris, thousands of kilometers from Aïn Leuh (…) Si Moh has a subtitle that would be just as appropriate for Forêt: des kilomètres de secondes à rechercher la mort exacte (Miles of Seconds In search of Perfect Death). It is the story of a North African looking for work. Between the compatriots he meets and an address for a job, he wanders the French capital and gets lost (...)”, like Rechiche’s protagonist, except his forest is made of concrete. We extend Bouanani’s intuition by also including Rechiche’s Al-Boraq, and three student shorts made by Moroccan filmmakers in Łódź. These six films, made around the same time in different locations, convey a sense of ominousness, a political intuition of impending doom at the height of the oppressive Years of Lead.

    Une ombre parmi d’autres
    Abdelkader Lagtaâ
    Poland, 1969, 5 min, digital, B&W, silent

    Chant pour la mort des adolescents
    Idriss Karim
    Poland, 1973, 11 min, digital, B&W Polish

    Marta
    Idriss Karim
    Poland, 1969, 6 min, digital, B&W, Polish

    Si Moh, pas de chance
    Moumen Smihi
    France, 1971, 17 min, digital, B&W, Arabic and French

    Forêt
    Majid Rechiche
    Morocco, 1970, 18 min, digital, B&W, Arabic

    Al-Boraq
    Majid Rechiche
    Morocco, 1972, 30 min, digital, B&W, Arabic
  • Session 4. Poets and Sociologists

    May 27, 20227:30 p.m.
    MADRID
    Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:30 p.m. 5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
    4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper documentation. You may only receive one discount. Sales in advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m. Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card). Assigned seats with tickets. Mask use is required at all times.
    Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
    We end the month of May passing the halfway point of this cycle dedicated to the beginnings of Moroccan documentary filmmaking. Tickets for this fourth session are already on sale online.
    This screening stages a confrontation between two parallel schools of documentary filmmaking: 1/ the “brief documentary school” pioneered by Mohamed Afifi, composed of poetic experiments among which Ahmed Bouanani included his own films, as well as Majid Rechiche’s Forêt and Al-Boraq; and 2/ the “sociological” school, whose filmmakers worked with (or were influenced by) Paul Pascon, who is often referred to as the father of Moroccan sociology. The sociological films were aiming for a form of ethnography that distances itself from its colonial roots, in order to re-appropriate and re-describe customs and rituals on local terms. The Afifi school displays formal rigor and suspicion toward commentary. For instance, for Afifi, Retour à Agadir is “not a documentary, much less a tourist film. If I had to recount it, I would say that it is the brief course of a memory presented under the guise of a statue in several movements. If this seemed insufficiently clear, I would add that the stanzas that make up Return to Agadir constitute a closed work. If the viewer finds a key, s/he owns the film.”

    De chair et d’acier
    Mohamed Afifi
    Morocco, 1959, 20 min, digital, B&W, French-Arabic

    Retour à Agadir
    Mohamed Afifi
    Morocco, 1967, 11 min, digital, B&W, no dialogue

    6 & 12
    Ahmed Bouanani, Majid Rechiche, Mohamed Abbderrahmane Tazi
    Morocco, 1968, 18 min, digital, B&W, no dialogue
    Copy in loan by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)

    Le rocher
    Larbi Benchekroun
    Morocco, 1958, 11 min, digital, B&W, French
    Copy in loan by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)

    Sin Agafaye
    Latif Lahlou
    Morocco, 1967, 22 min, digital, colour, French
    Copy in loan by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)

    Les tanneurs de Marrakech
    Mohammed Ait Youssef
    France, 1967, 21 min, digital, colour, French
    “Copy produced By Service du Film de Recherche Sciuentifique and realized by J.Aityoussef

    La nostalgie du naïf
    Mohammed Ait Youssef
    Morocco, 1977, 10 min, digital, B&W, French
    Copy in loan by the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM)
  • Session 5. Inner labyrinths

    June 03, 20227:30 p.m.
    MADRID
    Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:30 p.m. 5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
    4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper documentation. You may only receive one discount. Sales in advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m. Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card). Assigned seats with tickets. Mask use is required at all times.
    Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
    The cycle dedicated to the beginnings of documentary filmmaking in Morocco, curated by "Punto de Vista", continues during the month of June. Navarra International Documentary Film Festival. Tickets for the screening on Friday June 3rd are already on sale online.
    This screening brings together Ahmed El Maanouni’s first feature, shot in Morocco’s countryside, and a set of shorts made by four Moroccan directors while students in Łódź, where they were mentored by such documentary film greats as Kazimierz Karabasz. Alas, the remarkable political and aesthetic maturity of these student films remained a suspended promise: when they returned to Morocco, censorship and the marginalization of the documentary genre forced them to change course. Despite formal and contextual differences, all the films in this session draw us closer to the inner labyrinths of people experiencing forms of social exile. Perhaps due to their own status as new immigrants in Poland, in addition to their radical political commitments, Drissi, Derkaoui, Karim and Bensaid gravitated toward situations of racial discrimination, material poverty, and social marginalization. In Alyam, Alyam, El Maânouni films the ordinary life of rural Moroccans in a way that allows us to experience its cadence —all the while focusing on a young man whose sense of internal exile makes him fiercely want to leave the country.

    Lekcja 41
    Abdellah Drissi
    Poland, 1966, 7 min, digital, B&W, Polish
    Copy provided by Łódź Film School

    Adoption
    Mostafa Derkaoui
    Poland, 1968, 4 min, ditigal, B&W, Polish
    Copy provided by Łódź Film School

    Zofia et Ludmila
    Hamid Bensaid
    Poland, 1971, 9 min, digital, B&W, Polish
    Copy provided by Łódź Film School

    Elzbieta K
    Idriss Karim
    Poland, 1973, 12 min, digital, B&W, Polish
    Copy provided by Łódź Film School

    Alyam, Alyam
    Ahmed El Maânouni
    Morocco, 1978, 80 min, digital, colour, Arabic
    Film restored in 2015 by The Film Foundation's World Cinema Project in collaboration with Ahmed El Maânouni. Restoration realized at the Cineteca di Bologna/L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory; 4k scan realized at the Eclair laboratories.
  • Session 6. Music without Make-up

    June 10, 20227:30 p.m.
    MADRID
    Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:30 p.m. 5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
    4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper documentation. You may only receive one discount. Sales in advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m. Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card). Assigned seats with tickets. Mask use is required at all times.
    Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
    On June 10 will take place the penultimate session of this film series curated by the International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra "Punto de vista", dedicated to the beginnings of Moroccan documentary cinema. Buy your ticket online now.
    Of all the art forms in 1970s and 80s Morocco, music was perhaps the most potent, aesthetically and politically. Nass El Ghiwane was an iconic band, both for the way they reclaimed and renewed a specifically Moroccan music rooted in African musical traditions, and for the way they voiced people’s freedom dreams. By devoting a film to them in which the band’s members are shown in their humble quotidianness, El Maanouni painted the poignant portrait of a generation. Transes’ producer, Izza Genini, would later direct her own musical films, in the form of an ample series of shorts devoted to different genres of traditional Moroccan music. The first one, Aita, is a portrait of legendary cheikha Fatna Bent Lhoucine, and was co-edited by Ahmed Bouanani. To introduce the session, we screen a brief feature on Tayeb Saddiki’s “masrah ennas” [People’s theater]. Saddiki pioneered a modern form of musical theater, which gave Nass El Ghiwane their early training in the 1960s. He is also the author of a feature film, Zeft (1984), which was produced by Genini.

    Masrah Ennas    
    Actualités marocaines
    Morocco, 1974, 6 min, digital, B&W, French

    Aita
    Izza Genini
    Morocco, 1987, 26 min, digital, colour, Arabic-French

    Transes
    Ahmed El Maanouni
    Morocco, 1981, 88 min, digital, colour, Arabic
    Film restored in 2007 by The World Cinema Foundation at the Cineteca di Bologna/L'Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ahmed El Maânouni and Izza Genini. The restoration was financed by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways and Qatar Museum Authority.
  • Session 7. The Seventh Gate

    June 17, 20227:30 p.m.
    MADRID
    Casa Árabe Auditorium (at Calle Alcalá, 62). 7:30 p.m. 5 euros: general tickets at the box office.
    4 euros: Tickets purchased online, the officially unemployed, Casa Árabe Language Center students and Youth Card holders, by showing the proper documentation. You may only receive one discount. Sales in advance at www.casaarabe.es up to the day of the screening at 12:00 p.m. Those tickets not sold online will be made available for purchase on the day of the screening at Casa Árabe’s headquarters, as of one hour before each screening (payment in cash or by debit/credit card). Assigned seats with tickets. Mask use is required at all times.
    Films shown in the original language version with subtitles in Spanish.
    On June 17, the last session of the cycle we have dedicated to the beginnings of Moroccan documentary cinema will take place at Casa Árabe's headquarters in Madrid. The exhibition has been curated by "Punto de Vista". Navarra International Documentary Film Festival.
    Completed in 1987, Ahmed Bouanani’s La Septième Porte [The Seventh Gate], like most of his manuscripts, remained unpublished for over three decades before it started its existence as a book at the end of 2020. Today we celebrate its Spanish translation, published on the occasion of this retrospective, by screening Ali Essafi’ film, Crossing the Seventh Gate. It is a feature-length portrait of Ahmed Bouanani, whom Essafi visited and filmed from 2007 until his death in 2011. By then, Bouanani was leading a reclusive life in a remote village with his wife Naïma and many cats, amid huge piles of books and manuscripts. He was physically frail but unbroken in spirit. Combined with photographs, documents, film excerpts, and an old TV interview, Bouanani’s comments about his place within Moroccan cinema, the censorship he was subjected to, and his work as a film editor give a poignant sense of his lasting relevance and unshakable integrity.

    Crossing the Seventh Gate
    Ali Essafi
    Morocco, 2017, 80 min, DCP, colour, Arab-French

Related content

La Septième Porte [The Seventh Gate]

Casa Árabe and the Navarra International Documentary Film Festival "Punto de Vista", in collaboration with Cineteca Madrid, present this history of cinema in Morocco from 1907 to 1986 by Ahmed Bouanani on Tuesday 3 May in Madrid.
May 3, 2022 MADRID