(Casablanca) A young generation of Moroccan filmmakers has just emerged at the Cannes Film Festival where three of them won prizes in parallel sections, a new wave that prefigures a revival of the 7e art in Morocco.
“The Moroccan films screened in Cannes are among the best in the history of cinema in Morocco,” Moroccan critic Bilal Marmid, who covered the Cannes fortnight, told AFP.
The 32-year-old director Asmae El Moudir won the coveted prize for directing in the Un certain regard selection with Kadib Abyad (The mother of all lies).
His documentary explores the haunted past of his family and, beyond that, that of the Moroccan kingdom during the “years of lead” of the reign of Hassan II.
In the absence of archive footage, the filmmaker imagined an ingenious device by filming a model of the neighborhood of her childhood in Casablanca as well as figurines to narrate a family past, with the “hunger riots” suppressed in the background. blood, in June 1981 in Casablanca.
“Making this film took me ten years and allowed me to reconcile with this past, even if it could have been violent”, underlines to AFP Asmae El Moudir, who has members of his family play there. .
“A Child’s Dream”
“Being in Cannes is a childhood dream come true. Being selected is wonderful, but winning prizes is even more so,” she exclaims.
It is also in Casablanca that Kamal Lazraq, 38, set the scene for his first feature film: packsjury prize in the same Un certain regard selection.
The film takes viewers on a hellish night in the suburbs of the metropolis where a man and his son, marginalized, try to make a corpse disappear after a kidnapping that has gone wrong.
packsdescribed by Mr. Lazraq as “a road movie feverish through Casablanca”, is based on two non-professional actors, Ayoub Elaid and Abdellatif Masstouri.
“I like to start from a blank page and build the film with my actors, because they bring a lot of their experience and their experiences”, confides to AFP the Casablanca native back from the Côte d’Azur. “I try to leave them a certain freedom to create together something authentic and intense”.
PHOTO FADEL SENNA, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
It is also in Casablanca that Kamal Lazraq, 38, set the scene for his first feature film: packsjury prize in the same Un certain regard selection.
After the screening, “we had the impression that the film had been understood as it should be, that we hadn’t taken the wrong road, so it’s a great relief”, underlines Kamal Lazraq, for who “the price is the icing on the cake” after a “rather long and difficult shoot”.
“Victory of the Youth”
“The films are all different, it creates emulation, I hope it will encourage young people (Moroccans) to embark on the adventure”, he pleads.
A call that resonates with Zineb Wakrim, a 22-year-old apprentice director who received with her short film Ayyur (Moon in Amazigh, the Berber language) on 3e Cinef prize, dedicated to film school films.
She paints the portrait of two teenagers suffering from the “disease of the children of the moon”, a rare genetic pathology whose victims cannot bear the rays of the sun.
Presenting her short film at Cannes was “a great victory for young people”, believes this graduate of the Superior School of Visual Arts in Marrakech (ESAV).
Moroccan cinema blossomed in the 1970s and 80s with the presentation by a few filmmakers of innovative and powerful works, such as Mustapha Derkaoui (Of some meaningless events1974), Ahmed Bouanani (The Mirage1980) or Ahmed Maanouni (Alyam Alyam1978).
Over the past two decades, other directors – such as Faouzi Bensaïdi (thousand months2003), Nabil Ayouch (God’s horses2012) or recently Maryam Touzani (The blue of the caftan2022) – distinguished themselves, but rather on an individual basis without any overall dynamic.
Morocco seeks to support and promote its cinema, with an annual public aid budget for production of 60 million dirhams (around $8 million) since 2012.