The Marrakech Festival, I have often attended. Two pandemic years had put it on hold. Here he is again on his feet. Here, international stars come to tread the red carpets, for the mythical city in part, so beautiful with its Djemaa el Fna square, its souks and its tortuous old medina. So, the juries of this meeting could compete with those of Cannes. This year, Paolo Sorrentino is presiding over it alongside Franco-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim, German actress Diane Kruger, Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel, his Lebanese colleague Nadine Labaki and Moroccan filmmaker Laïla Marrakchi, on behalf of predestined. Tributes are paid here to James Gray, Tilda Swinton, among others. Even Dominique Strauss-Kahn showed up at the opening, like Marion Cotillard and Isabelle Huppert…
As for the ocher city, so popular with tourists, it finds its travelers, but the price of oil is prohibitive, and taxi drivers sigh. Many unemployed people are out of work. As for the workers at the bottom of the ladder, their already precarious condition is getting worse. On the way to the hotel, even an exhausted carriage horse collapsed before my eyes. The surrounding dogs were barking loudly. Out of solidarity, I hope.
And French ? Yesterday still spoken by all after Arabic, we find it in decline. Younger generations are turning to English as a second language. French remains for them the language of the colonizer. Morocco was from 1912 to 1956 a protectorate of this empire, and the memories are vivid.
The chic festival is a golden setting, but its industry also creates jobs. We talk about cinema, an art and its platforms that change quickly. So much so that film meetings, dedicated to the big screen, seem to carry the seventh art like the titan Atlas on their shoulders. Speaking of the Atlas, the mountain range of this name lets you admire its high peaks south of Marrakech on a clear day. True magic.
The Franco-Algerian Tahar Rahim explained to us that when he started out in the cinema in Paris, he had a serious problem with the stereotyped and negative roles offered to North African actors. “But for ten years, young filmmakers from these communities have been making films. It was time. »
As for Laïla Marrakchi, who tours in France as well as in Morocco, she is looking for female models in her country. “I want to take up the cause of Muslim women. I assume this feminism. »
In competition: films from everywhere with a strong component from the Middle East and the Maghreb. I threw myself on these films first, witnesses of a world often in implosion.
You had to feel the excitement of the young Iranian director Emad Aleebrahim Dehkordi before the screening of his dark Black Knight. He took part in the street fights in Tehran at home for the freedom of women to remove their veils and for human rights. Its actors had not been able to leave the homeland of the mullahs in these troubled times. He said: “We must celebrate here, but is it possible? His film about a bereaved family and a son launched into the drug market to make money, and whose brother must pay the price for the slippages, is a captured tragedy that exhibits the fractures of the country.
Also seen, the fascinating Ashkal, of the Tunisian Youssef Chebbi, camped during the 2018 revolution. In the gardens of Carthage, near Tunis, the construction of buildings is seen stopped by the crisis, and two policemen investigate the immolations of young people in the abandoned construction sites, pushed by a mysterious leader. This rhythmic and terrifying thriller skillfully mixes the political issues of the Arab Spring with the human dramas in their wake.
Out of competition, was presented the harkis, by Philippe Faucon (Fatima), French son of a soldier born in Morocco then transplanted to Algeria. The harkis were those Algerians who, during the war of independence (1954-1962), fought with the French army. In most cases abandoned by de Gaulle after fine promises, when the colony collapsed, deemed traitors in their homeland, many were massacred. This academic work, but well conducted, is based above all on the light thrown on these outcasts. The condition of harkis is still taboo in France, and this film helped to shake people’s minds.
During a gala screening on Sunday, already shown in Cannes, The Cairo conspiracy, by the Swedish of Egyptian origin Tarik Saleh, a remarkable work on the backstage intrigues to find a new imam when the Sunni religious elites and the political authorities get involved, had a completely different impact on Muslim soil. Here, religious questions are so neuralgic… The festivals then regain their full meaning. They say, they show, they raise doubts.