Memory 14 (Mémoire 14)

Cinematographer: Majid Rechich

Screenwriter: Ahmed Bouanani

Producer: Centre Cinématographique Marocain

Executive Producer: Omar Ghannam

Languages:

Country:

Composer: Abdeslam Sefrioui

Editor: Ahmed Bouanani

Synopsis: In the late 1960s, Ahmed Bouanani—working as an editor for the CCM—was “exiled” to the organization’s cinematic archives as a punishment for alleged leftist sympathies. Turning the assignment to his advantage, he made a found-footage film that repurposed the documentaries produced by the French during the colonial period to a strong anticolonial essay film. While censored by the Moroccan authorities to just a fifth of its original running time, this film—which also deploys Bouanani’s interest in poetry and popular arts—is a testament to the resistance of Morocco’s inhabitants and the memory of social and cultural practices never entirely extinguished by the colonial project.

Ahmed Bouanani
Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011) was a filmmaker, poet, novelist, and painter. As filmmaker, he worked in many capacities as an editor, writer, and director. His sole feature-length film as director is Mirage (Assarab, 1979) but he directed and edited many more works of short fiction and documentary, including Six and Twelve (Six et Douze, 1968), Memory 14 (Mémoire 14, 1971) and The Four Springs (Les quatres sources, 1977). His abiding interest in the combination of Moroccan popular practices and languages with cinematic and artistic modernism is present across his remarkable oeuvre.

Ahmed Bouanani

Ahmed Bouanani (1938-2011) was a filmmaker, poet, novelist, and painter. As filmmaker, he worked in many capacities as an editor, writer, and director. His sole feature-length film as director is Mirage (Assarab, 1979) but he directed and edited many more works of short fiction and documentary, including Six and Twelve (Six et Douze, 1968), Memory 14 (Mémoire 14, 1971) and The Four Springs (Les quatres sources, 1977). His abiding interest in the combination of Moroccan popular practices and languages with cinematic and artistic modernism is present across his remarkable oeuvre.

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