Independent film in Morocco – curated by Bouchra Khalili & Hicham Falah

Here and There: Explorations in Contemporary Moroccan Short Film

Moroccan cinema is a young and post-colonial cinema, and since its inception has been nomadic and characterised by restless wandering and exile. Its first steps consisted largely of short pedagogic films. And after independence, there was a need to educate a young nation facing new challenges. During the 1960s and the 1970s the nature and vocation of Moroccan cinema, and its relation to itself and to society, were under question. But since the 1990s, and with the closing of the borders, the question of passing through and crossing became one of the major issues it tackled. Thus, the 1990s and the beginning of the new century witnessed the emergence of a generation of scriptwriters who lived between two countries or in the diaspora, and participated in the recent renewal of contemporary Moroccan cinema.

The proposed programme is an exploration of that new national cinema, with the diversity practiced by its scriptwriters: fiction, documentary and documentary essay, and also experimental cinema. The main issue tackled by this programme is how during the last ten years Moroccan cinema has tried to deal with the thorny reality of the country through a precise cartography of the questions shaking the core of society: immigration, returning to the homeland, urban changes, social mutations and the position of women.

Thus Kamal Al-Mahouti, with his My Lost House, set out to reveal a possible archaeology of immigration, attempting to define its path: the departure, the gap between the territory of origin and that of the new life, the unique situation of children born and raised in this fragmented space who resist their truncated genealogy because the history of such a departure can not be transmitted.

On the other hand, Your Black Hair Ihsan (Tes cheveux noirs Ihsan, 2005) by Tala Hadid positions itself at the path of returning to the origins. The visible simplicity of the story allowed Hadid to test the capacity of images to withhold memory, to extend a territory invested by memories into a pure mental and sensory dimension where immediate reality and reminiscences become progressively indistinct. The beauty of the film is due precisely to this issue of return considered as a return to oneself, to an existential loneliness that cannot be relieved by the return he is trying to intensify.

Abu Ali with Wahab reveals with a poetic and poignant melancholy the restless wandering of a plastic bag in the streets of Tangier. At the crossroads of many approaches – documentary, artistic and experimental cinema – the artist who pursues modestly an anecdotal reality reveals a fragment of urban space infected by emptiness and melancholia. In blurring the margins, he succeeds through a hallucinated vision of ghostly silhouettes, to refer to the vision of the candidates for exile literally caught by a vision of elsewhere so close but still faraway.

The films proposed x-ray, each in its own way, the status of modern Moroccan society, but demonstrate also the anxious and vigilant vitality of young Moroccan cinema.