Mostafa Derkaoui
, 1974
, 76 min
Synopsis: In January 1974, Mostafa Derkaoui returned to Casablanca from his studies at the film college in Łódź, Poland. Together with his brother Abdelkrim, he shot his first film in the city’s bars and streets, in the harbour and the poorer districts. The independently produced film was borne by a collective energy unique in the cultural…
Ahmed Bouanani
, 1971
, 24 min
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…
, 1968
, 16 min
Synopsis: Six and Twelve is one of a series of short films and documentaries produced under the auspices of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain in the years after Moroccan independence. While most of these were utilitarian in nature, Bouanani, Tazi, and Rechiche took a different route with this film, creating a modernist “city symphony” film that documented six…
Moumen Smihi
, 2005
, 83 min
Synopsis: This film, the first in what has become a kind of semi-autobiographical trilogy for Smihi, follows the everyday experiences of a young, timid, pre-teen, boy, Mohamed-Larbi Salmi, who grows up trying to make sense of the gentle religious upbringing of his father, the secular education offered him in French school, and his budding desires for…
Meriem Bennani
, 2017
, 19 min
A playful and moving portrait of some women in Morocco. Evoking reality television, home video, and ethnographic film, its visual language is at once intimate and whimsical, with the director’s digital manipulations by turns amplifying and undermining her subjects’ self-presentations. Bennani’s women discuss love and romance, dating and friendship, loneliness and community, all set against…
Yto Barrada
, 2011
, 15 min
Barrada digs into her family history and narrates 16 myths based on unreliable narrators and unverifiable stories, illustrated with strangers’ home movies found at flea markets and archival films from the last half-century in Morocco.8
April 2024
The African Film Institute presents Ahmed El Maanouni’s Al Hal [Trances] Thursday, April 18 at 7pme-flux172 Classon AvenueBrooklyn, NY 11205USA Ahmed El Maanouni’s Al Hal [Trances] is a classic of Moroccan cinema and a compelling introduction to it. While presenting itself as a music documentary on the iconic band Nass El Ghiwane, it is also a film about…
July 2023
Nadia Shihab, Yto Barrada, Firouzeh Khosrovani
FAMILY PORTRAIT presents a compelling program of personal works by filmmakers who courageously turn the lens on their own families, revealing the resulting fractures that shape the fabric of their personal identities. Through these films, the filmmakers embark on a journey of excavation, unearthing their family histories and sharing intimate narratives that illuminate the interplay…
Barrada digs into her family history and narrates 16 myths based on unreliable narrators and unverifiable stories, illustrated with strangers’ home movies found at flea markets and archival films from the last half-century in Morocco.
February 2023
Maryam Touzani, Lila Nazemian
THE BLUE CAFTAN Screening of The Blue Caftan with an introduction by Lila Nazemian (ArteEast) Saturday, February 11, at 2:45pm Film Forum, 209 West Houston St. west of 6th Ave RSVP here The Blue Caftan, Maryam Touzan, Morocco, 2022, 118 mins “A film of exquisite sensuality… transfixing delicacy and restraint… its supple rhythms hypnotic, its atmosphere potent and…
