You know we should have had... Oh. It's okay. Okay, so while people are joining us, I just want to say welcome to this event hosted by the SOAS Middle East Institute and co-chaired by myself, Dina Matar, Center for Palestine.
studies and Nargis Farzad, chair of the center for Iranian studies and we've got Aki who is you know the lifesaver who does everything and the organization so he's he's in the background helping everything move on. So this is going to be a special evening because it's talking about Moroccan cinema which has always been exciting and original and thought-provoking in from my perspective and we have three panelists here to talk about the recent collaboration in Morocco Uncut and so I will introduce them beginning with the lady Florian Lawrence Martin, who works on French transnational studies at Goucher University in the United States. Welcome.
And then Professor William Hughes, who is professor of film studies at Exeter University. And I've also got Jamal Balmand, who is a lecturer in cinema, I think, or in film, but correct me if I'm wrong, at Muhammad V University in in Morocco, Rabat. So welcome everything.
The format today will be a discussion or presentations from each of the panelists here that will take around half an hour, 20 minutes to half an hour. And then we have, we ask you to put your questions in the question and answer bubble at the bottom of your Zoom screen. And we will collect those questions and we will post them.
to pose those questions to the authors. They're going to talk without presentations, so that will be quite interesting to then think about the questions that arise as they are talking. Without further ado, welcome to SOAS online, and looking forward to hearing your presentation. I don't know who wants to start, but it's up to you to decide.
Okay. Thank you, Dean. that will be me. So my name is Will Higby and together with Jamal, Bahmad and Flo Martin, we form part of a research team that's been looking quite intensively at the current state and the development of Moroccan cinema in all its many forms and guises over the past five years or so we've been working together.
What we wanted to do with this session was really to have a a brief introduction from the three of us moving across some of the what we think are the key questions and key approaches in relation to not only the research project but also the book and then open this up for discussion as much as possible. We're really really delighted to be here and sort of thank you very much for inviting us and we hope this is going to be a sort of an open and sort of lively discussion. Just to start with, perhaps I should say a few words about why we came to this project, you know, why focus on Moroccan cinema? So the project that led to the book Moroccan Cinema Uncut really began in around 2015. It was a research project that was supported by the AHRC for three years and the activities involved in the research project were quite varied. So we had sort of the more sort of traditional research activities that were going on amongst the team, but we're also very clear that this was a project that we wanted to engage with the Moroccan film industry, with Moroccan filmmakers and with film educators and film students in Morocco.
So there was very much a focus in this project on engaging with the film industry, with the SESAM which is the National Screen Agency, the Moroccan Film Council. but also with filmmakers and with festivals and festival organisers. Because one of the things that we were particularly interested in was the fact that Moroccan cinema had had this sort of very impressive rise since the mid-1990s. For so long, it had been overshadowed, I think, by the achievements and the output of Algerian, Tunisian cinema, certainly in the sort of 70s, 80s and early 90s.
But from the mid-1990s to around... 2015, there'd been a very significant rise in terms of production due to investment in film production coming from the state. So moving from around two or three films a year in the late 1980s to 25 to 30 feature films in the mid-2010s, which placed Morocco as, according to some estimations, the fourth largest producer of films on the African continent.
So This increase in production and a growing international recognition for a limited number of Moroccan art house directors was coming to our attention but at the same time it was led with a with a sort of paradox that at the same time there was there were more films that were being produced there was a question as to where these films were being seen it was precisely a moment when distribution and exhibition the infrastructure in Morocco was in crisis. And there was really only a limited visibility internationally for Moroccan cinema. So the aim of the book was to ask why this might be, and to see if an analysis of Moroccan cinema and the Moroccan film industry could also act as a case study for other small nation cinemas, to use Duncan Petrie and Meta Huot's term, in Africa but also in the MENA region.
And Flo's going to pick up on this point in a moment, but we felt that the transnational approach was the right way to frame this analysis of the current state of Moroccan cinema. Firstly, because the transnational, we think, allows us to explore the dynamic between the national and the transnational, the local and the global. And to look at this as a kind of a dynamic, fluid, but also contested relationship.
For example, sometimes the relationship between diasporic filmmakers and their counterparts in Morocco. But we also wanted to use the transnational of a way of understanding this, the challenges and opportunities there were for these filmmakers, not only in producing films but also and particularly in the way in which these films could circulate internationally through international film festivals and thinking of the opportunities and possibilities that were being offered increasingly by digital disruption and the online distribution of these films. So the book itself was divided into three parts looking firstly at what we call production from above which was essentially the established production hubs for Moroccan cinema the well-established models of international co-production um on the other hand looking at in the second part of cinema from below which was considering how there are also at the same time Moroccan filmmakers who are working totally outside of that system um and looking for ways in which their films can reach audiences in quite different ways um you but also thinking about in this idea of production from below alternative means of film education that are appearing, different ways in which emerging Moroccan filmmakers can get training and access to the means of production. And finally the third part looks specifically at distribution networks, so not just audiences internationally and nationally, but also festivals and the challenges as I said posed by digital disruption.
Flo is going to pick up now on this question of the theoretical grounding around transnationalism and then Jamal is going to talk a bit more about this idea of a multiplicity of voices. So I'll hand over to Flo first of all. Thank you, thank you Will. My name is Flo Martin, I teach at Goucher College in the US.
So our approach was matched by an evolving context obviously from, if you wish, picture it as a widening circle that goes from the post-colonial to a post-post-colonial to the transnational, the globalized. So applying an exclusive post-colonial lens as we've done in previous in previous things in the years 2010 is problematic for Moroccan cinema because the enduring influence left by the French colonial rule on society, politics, cultural productions is much less vivid than it used to be in the 1970s or 80s. The pioneers of the time, Bounani, Manouni, Beliazid and so on, born under the colonial rule had come back from training outside the kingdom. and shot documentaries for the CCM to support the independent nation, and also shot feature films that explored nationalistic struggles, or at minimum denounced the colonial rule.
But now we're dealing with filmmakers who were born after the colonial rule, and they are more likely to denounce the impact of neoliberal globalization on contemporary Moroccan society. rather than leading to economic disparities, migrations, and so on and so forth. So we're clearly at this point in a post-post-colonial era.
So what are we going to do? Even if France is still the major partner for transnational productions, we have observed a de-orbiting move away from an excessive reliance on the axis, the old colonial axis, Morocco and France. in both the filmic narratives and in the modes of production.
The films are in Moroccan Darija rather than in French, they tackle Moroccan themes rather than French themes, and they no longer exclusively rely on the French funding planet, if you wish. So Moroccan producers have joined a much wider transnational network of funding centers outside of France, be they in Europe, like Brussels, Amsterdam, or in the Arab world like Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi. And then today's French influence appears in a much more muted, hybridized fashion within a larger context of globalized influences.
So it is these global influences, both in terms of artistic production and financial production, that we were interested in looking at. In that sense, today's Moroccan transnational cinema is de-centered, free to engage in a circulation of people, of goods, of narratives, of languages, funding schemes across multiple borders, as opposed to what it used to do in the previous incarnation of Moroccan cinema. It has also decentered at home. It no longer relies exclusively, we show, on traditional national sites of production like the CCM or the Ouarzazate studios, but also on production hubs such as Casablanca and Tangier, which have become increasingly cosmopolitan due in part to the return of diasporic filmmakers to Morocco or to what Will calls cinéaste de passage.
Finally, the network of retribution is also decentered in several ways. In the age of post-cinema, so we've had post, post, post, and post again, post-cinema that we all know too well, especially right now that we are in a pandemic, and look, we're not in the cinema happy to view a movie on a large screen, but we are all sort of joining by a multiplicity of screens. And... On that, I will give my mic to Jamal. Thanks, Flo.
So hello, everyone. My name is Jamal Bahmad. I teach at Mohamed V University in Rabat, Morocco. So there is a lot that is new about this book that is new and fresh.
So, I mean, Flo and Dan Dwell have mentioned the approach that you have taken towards Moroccan cinema. But let me also... to say a little bit about the material, what is included in the book in terms of content.
So there has been a lot of scholarship on Moroccan cinema before, of course, I mean in different languages, so a lot of it in French but a lot more in Arabic and published locally. Unfortunately that doesn't get a lot of international visibility but also there has been, I mean a modest sum of knowledge production about the cinema in English. Yet, I mean, this book is really, I mean, very inclusive.
So when we started this project, just like three of us, and then Stephanie Van Der Peer, who was also a research fellow on the project, like myself, we started just interviewing everyone and talking to different people without really trying to come to any conclusions at all. For the first two years, we were just really very open and very broad, and we organized events as part of the project, and brought in people together for the first time. And that resulted in really a book that tries to look at Moroccan cinema in a very inclusive way, hence the end cut in the title.
To try to include, I mean to really talk about Moroccan cinema in all its complexity and diversity. So, for the first time in a book about Moroccan cinema. There are sections about Amazigh cinema, so cinema in the Berber language.
We talk about its history, but also challenges that it faced at the beginning in the 1990s, when it first came into existence, but also challenges that it faced because of the digital disruption after the 2000s. We talk also about a new kind of Moroccan filmmaking that exists within the broad tent of Moroccan cinema. So we talk about radical filmmaking, experimental filmmaking.
We talk about people like Nadir Bouhammoush, and Hicham Al-Isri. And then we talk also about places that have been like production hubs of Moroccan cinema, Moroccan international cinema, that had been overlooked before, like Wersazat. But we don't talk also just about Wersazat as the place where films like Babel and other movies, Lawrence of Arabia and so on were produced in the past.
We talk about it as a place that also is home to a film scoop. So film schools are included in this book and that's also something new, but it's also a new phenomenon in the country, but we talk about really how Moroccan film students are a new kind of demographic in the landscape of Moroccan cinema and they are here in the age of digital disruption and they are trying to make their voices heard in a cinema system that is not always flexible enough. I mean we'll talk about that much later today. So, I mean, transnational approach that Will and Flo have explained really allowed us to take stock, but also to examine, you know, all this diversity in a very multi-sided and truly, genuinely interdisciplinary way.
And both in Morocco and at home, because Moroccan cinema is not just Moroccan cinema in its, like, national circulation, but also in its global circulation, and not only in, like, in the... in France, but also, I mean, all over the world, really in the Middle East, in the Americas and so on. So, and we really hope, I mean, I think one plus of this book is that we hope that it would be the first step, okay, in a new kind of scholarship about Moroccan cinema that would go beyond, I mean, the interpretive framework of national cinema or like the analytical framework of Moroccan cinema being all about CCM.
the Moroccan cinema center in Rabat, national film bureaucracy and so on. Moroccan cinema is much more diverse than that and it's becoming even more diverse and more complicated in the age of globalization. Yeah, thank you. Okay, thanks Jamal.
Before we opened it out to a broader discussion and maybe got to some of the questions in the Q&A, another thing we wanted to do was just we each picked, we each selected what we felt was a question. that was an important question or theme that was running through the book itself. So we're just going to speak very briefly, each of us about that.
I'm going to start, one of the kind of driving questions for me was how does or how can Moroccan cinema realise a transnational reach? Because we talked about earlier the difficulty for Moroccan cinema to reach an international audience. Actually, that difficulty starts domestically as well. that despite this success in raising levels of production and the inward investment that is attracting foreign producers to come and shoot in Morocco, which we have to acknowledge benefits the foreign producers far more than it does the local filmmakers, we were trying to think about what steps could be put in place and working with industry and working with filmmakers to better understand how they could reach a transnational audience.
So One of the things that we focused on in the book in particular was the importance of international co-production, both in what you might call official. bilateral multilateral treaty agreements between different nation states but also unofficial so the work that goes on for example outside of the the official channels and collaboration between filmmakers we one of the things we noticed as well was that that there's there used to be very much a kind of um emphasis on the post-colonial access between access between france and morocco and although it's still true that the largest number of co-productions that that take place are between France and Morocco. Actually just focusing on that relationship solely and thinking in terms of a post-colonial cinema belies the kind of impact and development of international co-production activity that's going on in South America with Argentina for example, in with an increasing number of European nations but also in relation to the Gulf States.
And we're thinking here not only about co-production, but also the money that's being invested through film festivals and film funds in relation to development and post-production. So understanding how Moroccan filmmakers can navigate that international landscape of film funds, co-production and film markets was a key question that was running through the book for us. And there's also an issue of how that links into the international festival network. because the international festival network operates, you know, of major A-list international film festivals, but also of smaller niche boutique festivals, film festivals that operate within a national context, is really important for Moroccan filmmakers in the sense that it functions as a kind of alternative distribution network for the filmmakers to have their films reach international audiences. but also that festival network is important in terms of the networking function that it offers for in terms of the industry to build professional relationships, to look for co-producing partners, to also gain an advantage of through transnational talent development as we call it in relation to better kind of accessing training labs and development initiatives and schemes and so forth for Moroccan filmmakers.
This is something that we were very keen to emphasise in the study, but it's also something that is incredibly challenging. And one of the things that we found is there was often a disparity and a disconnect between a small elite of filmmakers, often located in the diaspora, who were more attuned to those opportunities internationally, better equipped to network and to travel internationally to those festivals and markets. And who's filmed? travel better on the international festival network. So there's still, I think, work to be done in terms of allowing a greater range of Moroccan cinema in its true diversity to reach international audiences and to find those audiences, which kind of brings me on to the final point that I wanted to note there, which is just the way in which digital disruption has changed that landscape in terms of access.
On the one hand, we can see that Moroccan films can travel virtually as never before. They can find audiences, they can be seen on platforms. And we did notice in the research we did that there were sort of examples of that success happening. But equally that issue of access, even in a digital age and in relation to sort of online viewing, still remains. The question of who are the gatekeepers, how films access and reach their audiences is a really important one and we can maybe elaborate on that a bit later in terms of the challenges that Moroccan cinema finds in terms of accessing those digital online distribution networks to reach its audiences.
But I just want to finish just to stop there and then hand over to Flo who's going to say a bit more. Thanks Will. So my question that I'm going to talk about today is how does Moroccan cinema accommodate diverse voices Or even perhaps flip it and say, how do diverse voices find a way into Moroccan transnational cinema in the years 2010?
And so to be brief, I'll mention three marginalized groups, the Jewish community, the Amazigh community and women. And I will probably lean more on women. Amazigh cinema, as Jamal told you earlier, developed.
in the 1990s in what became a Susiwood, just like Nollywood and Bollywood, from the region of Sus. A cinema on VHS that was easy to ship to the remote villages and also to the diaspora. and it was not necessarily supported by the state given its nationalistic cultural impulses.
So starting in the years 2000, the Amazigh diasporic filmmakers become professional filmmakers and we see Yasmin Kassari direct The Sleeping Child, for instance, the first film with extensive dialogues in the Amazigh, and Mohammed Amin Ben Amraoui film Adios Carmen, shot in the RIF entirely in tarifit in Spanish. So both transnational productions, and that's important, they were this time funded by Doha, Belgium, all sorts of other places outside of Morocco. These transnational productions tour the international festivals and gain some international visibility. The rise of Amazigh film is then confirmed at home by Kamal Ashkar's Tighir Jerusalem, Echoes of the Melah, which is a fascinating documentary on the shared histories of the Jewish community and the Amazigh community. And then his latest incarnation, one we found, was by people like Tala Hadid, a woman of director of Moroccan and Iraqi descent, who directed The Narrow Frame of Midnight, a transnational co-production with a transnational narrative actually that moves between Morocco, Kurdistan, Turkey, Iraq, and she played with a variety of transnational centers in order to produce her film.
She got funding from the CCM in Morocco, the British Institute, Doha, Sundance, Fonds Sud, the Alouane Foundation, which is exactly what Moroccan women do, we argue. In the years 2000, their numbers has grown from four in the 1980s to over 20, and that's in part due to the digital revolution, but they in the years 2010 have two distinctive creative strategies in order to produce. One is to negotiate with the establishment and the other one is to circumvent it and go from one to the other. So in the first instance women directors become very savvy in negotiating within and outside the social cultural political landscape of Morocco and its institutions like The M, the TV channel or the CCM, both in the way they finance their films transnationally and in the representational strategies they adopt to address taboos.
Women no longer systematically resort to coded language, for instance, to talk about themselves or about sex. They also respond to what is going on in Morocco, the king, and it's very difficult for us, I think, to actually, I just need to say, to put it out there, to talk about Morocco without talking about the larger context of Morocco, historical and political, which is what we do in the book, so you know, so it's completely contextualized. So they respond to what's going on, would be it's the Mudawana, the new family code in 2004, or the Me Too movement, which is more global, as you know. For instance, in our, and they also respond to political initiatives such as the Equity and Reconciliation Commission that Mohammed VI put on in order to examine the years of lead.
So this is a whole, anyway. And much like Hadid, Killani's transnational production assembled funds from institutions for her film Our Forbidden Places in 2008, from institutions including the CCM, the Equity and Reconciliation Commission in Morocco, the CNC and Fonds Sud in France, and also won multiple awards for her film. Yasmani Kasari also films beyond in her fiction film, The Sleeping Child, about the women left behind by their husbands who are migrating to Europe.
Her focus is on a triply marginalized community, Amazigh, rural and female. And that triple marginalized community element makes the narrative all the more powerful. And again, this super local focus is a transnational production. Transnational film directors also respond to... the Mudawana, the new family code with films of various genres.
There is a comedy, number one by Tahiri. There is a rom-com, Maroc by Leila Marakchi. A documentary, I Have Something to Tell You by Dalila Enad.
And the latter is interesting to me because it is also a way of filming beyond the event of the Mudawana by seeing how women, how do you communicate that law to women, to poor rural women, or women in factories who do not know what their rights are. And so she shows what a long road there is still to go, no, the long road ahead to achieve equal rights. So even though Enad produced her film with the help of transnational institutions like Deux-M, NMO, CNC, French TVs, Her film does not completely celebrate the Muda Wana in some ways.
They also find ways, as I said, to circumvent the establishment and find new hubs of transnational production. And this is interesting. There are two main ways that we identified.
One is filmmakers turned installation artists who use funds from museums and foundations to produce either their films as Farida Ben-Liazid is doing. She is doing a series of short 26-minute long documentaries on Amazigh music and dance, paid for by the Leila Ben-Jeloud Mezzian Foundation, which will be hosted in a music on the multiple cultures of Morocco in Casablanca. And of course, all this didn't happen in a void, by the way, in a vacuum.
Mohamed VI did declare that there were multiple cultures in Morocco, as opposed to the old myth of one Arab Muslim Moroccan identity. And then the second one would be Bouchra Khalili, who in her activist video art, Straight Stories on Clandestine Passages, was a Muslim Muslim. at both the Strait of Gibraltar and the one in Istanbul, is actually using international funds and is exhibited at the MoMA in New York, at the Tuileries in Paris, and so on. Finally, Sonia Terrab, which is an interesting experiment, turned to something called GeoJab, an online talent incubator supported by Nabil Ayyush.
And she produced Marokkiat, a series of one-minute long capsules, which she now is distributing on Facebook, which are visible on Facebook. And these are in answer to the Me Too movement. And the capsules show each woman filmed frontally from various walks of life, various age groups.
And each woman is outside sort of reoccupying. the public space or occupying the public space. And I think this is quite a radical move.
It's shifting productions on film, shifting production and film viewing from physical locations to virtual ones with an online curating space means that you can dodge the control of the state, yet never be clandestine because Nabil Ayyush, who is supporting this, is one of the biggest producers in Casablanca, part of the establishment. So to skirt around the establishment is not to hide from it, but to maintain a transvergent relationship with it, to converge with it at times, to diverge from it at others. And the question, however, remains, which is the same question that Will posed, who will see these films, apart from the capsules on Facebook, how visible is this new cinema?
both within and outside the kingdom. And Jamal, it's yours to respond. What is the audience for Moroccan cinema today? Who are the people watching these movies?
And also like when filmmakers make movies, who are they making these films for? So the question of the audience is really a very critical one. But I mean, I want to link that question of the audience to really, I mean, something that has not been going well for Moroccan cinema.
So in terms of production numbers, in terms of international visibility, Moroccan cinema has gained a lot and has gained a lot of momentum, I mean, over the last two decades. Yet at home, the number of cinema theatres has gone down. So from about 300 cinemas in the early 80s, there are less than 30 cinemas left today.
So that is a big challenge for Moroccan cinema because a lot of films are being made. For example, 20 to 25 feature land fiction movies and documentaries every year. That's quite a lot on the African continent, a lot more short documentaries.
So the Moroccan government, through the National Cinema Center, CCM, is supporting a lot of productions, yet distributing and getting these movies to be watched by Moroccans, I mean, beyond the festival circuit, is a big challenge. Because the cinemas, even the small number of cinemas that are left, are mostly in big cities like Casablanca, Rabat, and then Tangier and Marrakech. So Moroccan cinema is not really, I mean, reaching its, like, audience using traditional channels of distribution and exhibition.
OK, come back to this point, because digital, I mean, disruption, I think it's responsible for what's been happening, because it's not happening only in Morocco, it's happening also, I mean, all over the continent or the African continent. So less people, especially less young people are going to the movies, are going to the cinema. watch films. So the number of film going numbers are really going down.
So even when we talk about Moroccan cinema, Moroccan films pop in the box office, okay, which is a kind of unique situation to Morocco since 1990s. So when there is a good Moroccan film out there, Moroccans go to cinema, they watch it more than they watch, you know, Hollywood productions and so on. Yet, the problem is that...
the number of theaters is going down, but also piracy is here. So piracy is a big problem. It is affecting all sorts of films in the country.
So if you go to Moroccan city now, before the pandemic of course, then you'd find that you can buy international movies and Moroccan movies as well for as little as four or five dirhams, ten dirhams and so on. I mean for a small like cinema like Moroccan cinema to have a piracy as a fact okay as an everyday I mean a reality out there is really a big problem but of course a lot of Moroccan film institutions they have blamed pirates really for contributing to the shrinking number of cinemas in the country I don't think that that is true and in this book we argue that I mean this film piracy does not always affect you know Moroccan films badly because if you take examples of Casa Nigra by Nourdel Khemari, which was a box office hit in 2008, it was released in cinemas but at the same time it was available in the black market as a DVD but also digital copies were available on the internet at the time. Still, the film did very very well in cinemas and although you know it was pirated really from day one. But a lot of movies that have not been pirated were released in cinemas and they didn't do very well.
So saying that piracy leads, OK, directly, I mean, to really to less people going to cinema to watch Moroccan movies is not, I mean, is not always true. But yet, I mean, piracy is here. But we see it rather as a phenomenon, as a cultural phenomenon that just shows that, you know, lots of things are happening. to distribution and exhibition of Moroccan arts. So more and more young people in particular, I mean, are watching these movies online, talking about them.
And I teach cinema to my students at the University in Rabat, and every year I run a research seminar on that. And the really level of interest in Moroccan cinema seems to be going up among young people. They know so much about it.
But when you ask how many times they go to the cinema, very, very few of them, I mean, really go to the cinema. And even when they go there, they go to watch international productions sometimes because they have blockbusters. The Moroccan movies, they seem to be consuming more of them online, because again, they are pirated, they are available. But also, during lockdown, when this crisis started, in March, in Morocco, the country, like everywhere around the world, imposed a lockdown on its people.
And then CCM, okay? Surprisingly, maybe, I mean, this kind of... film board of the country, which has often given this image as being very rigid, being very bureaucratic, being against the digitization of distribution and exhibition, launched a program of online screenings. So they screened a lot of Moroccan movies and that really led to a lot more interest in Moroccan cinema among the population, but especially among young people.
But still, I mean, the... Screening program of CCM stopped in November. Now, the movies that are made every year, many of them go to festivals, national and international.
Some are released in cinemas, but a lot really don't get to be watched by the Moroccan audience. So that is a big problem, and I think the film authorities need to do something about it. So really, they need to catch up with digital revolution. They need to, I mean, digitize some of these processes so that people, I mean, can go always, I mean, can go to cinema to watch movies, but at the same time people, especially in cities, like even Ouarzazate, which is cinema city of Morocco, you don't have, we don't have any cinemas. There used to be two, but they closed down a long time ago.
So, you know, a city that makes a lot of international productions, but also national ones, you don't have access, you know, to... I mean to cinema, to the movies, I mean to watch. So I mean they need to really, I mean to be more flexible, they need to create a digital infrastructure, I mean for distribution, exhibition to allow you know for people to watch not just movies made I mean like this year and next year but also the old classics of Moroccan cinema because some of the gems of Moroccan cinema were made in the 70s and 80s and unfortunately for young people today They are beyond reach and a lot of people don't really know that there was a Moroccan cinema in 60s and 70s and following decade.
So that is something that the Moroccan cinema center needs to think about. But also something else that has been really, and this is my last point, something that has really been bothering a lot of, especially young filmmakers, is the permit system. I mean the permit system, I mean if you want to shoot a movie in Morocco you need the permission of the Moroccan cinema center which is, I mean funding, I mean it provides a lot of funds for filmmakers but at the same time it's a censorship board. So people like Nader Bouhammoush and there is a section about him, so he's a radical filmmaker in Morocco and he, I mean makes films underground because he can't simply get permission to shoot the kinds of movies that he...
that he makes. So that is a big problem. Also for a young Moroccan filmmaker to get established today it's very difficult because of conditions that imposed by CCM like you should make three short movies, three short I mean films before you apply for funding but even when you apply for funding you need a production company to back your project and so on. It's very very difficult I mean for I mean for young filmmakers.
There are so many challenges out there, so many problems, and I hope that in future they will be resolved, so that Moroccan cinema is not only made, but also consumed, and especially consumed by the national audience as well. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Do you want to come back, William? No, no, I was just going to say that we're now... we can move into the onto the questions that are in the in the q a and i i don't know how you want to to work through those or all right i've got a question myself which which i can ask very briefly i'm going to ask nandas to come in and help because my internet went off and i've lost and i had to go out and come back so i have uh i have oh no i've got some questions now but i've lost a few questions at the top um But it's a quick question really, which is you talk about, you know, kind of the transnational, the transnational as kind of the conceptual framework as being there. So how does it relate to the national, particularly that in the case of the national in this case, you've got a... complex mixture of groups and languages and ethnicities and so on.
So how do you deal with that as a kind of, let us say, a conceptual... framework. So that's what I wanted to ask and then I think we just go to the questions.
It's an open question in many ways. Do you want me to begin with and then Flo and Jamal can? Yeah, whoever wants to answer.
I think the transnational as a sort of theoretical framework or an analytical framework, the way in which we've come at that is through the way largely in which film studies and film theory has engaged with the transnational. And the way in which that draws also on writing from sociology and other disciplines, it's a sort of interdisciplinary approach, but very much at the heart of that, I think, is a sense that film has, from its inception, been a transnational medium. And films cross borders and boundaries.
International co-production is very much a common part of how films are financed and made. But very interestingly, you know, there has been a strong development of an idea of national cinema. You know, national screen agencies are incredibly important in terms of promoting the supposed interests of often a particular vision of what a national cinema should be.
What we're interested in and using the transnational as a sort of as a framework and something that's been written about quite a lot in film studies is that the dialogue that there is between the national and the transnational. and the transnational, the idea that the national doesn't disappear when we think about cinema transnationally, it's about that dynamic between the two and often the tension that exists between the two and I think that an example of the place of diasporic filmmakers in Morocco is a really, really interesting one there and it illustrates that quite well. You know in the mid-1990s one of the things that the SESAM, the Moroccan Film Council did to try and sort of kickstart a greater international visibility for films and to increase the quality and the range of films being made, was to encourage Moroccans from the diaspora to return and make films with money coming from the Moroccan Film Council. That in itself did provide a sort of, Hicham El-Astri talks about it as an electric shock that sort of revitalised Moroccan cinema. And those perspectives are really valuable in terms of the sort of in the in the visibility of those filmmakers like Nabila Yoush, for example.
But at the same time, that has caused some resentment amongst certain Moroccan filmmakers who are very much based within Morocco and working within Morocco and not looking for international funds, who feel that those filmmakers are kind of taking away from the opportunities that they have. And in some ways, you know, we've conducted interviews with some filmmakers who say, well, you know, it's kind of a. They're Moroccan filmmakers, but they have a sort of, you know, more of a European perspective, say, on the kind of issues that we're looking at. So there's a tension there between, you know, an idea of a transnational Moroccan cinema and a national. So it's thinking about how those two things work together and also how, for example, you know, Jamal can speak about this much more and, you know, more eloquently and more knowledgeably because this is one of his kind of particular areas that he's worked on.
But the idea that Amazigh cinema, which. you know, for a long time was ignored as part of a Moroccan national cinema, has a transnational reach through its distribution online, through the circulation of DVDs and the kind of the films reaching a diasporic audience and reaching a kind of displaced audience within Morocco of Amazigh people who kind of moved to say larger cities outside of their home region, but also transnationally, you know. a kind of connection with a diasporic audience.
So there's a really interesting interplay there again between the local and the global and I think the final thing I'd say there as well is that the transnational I think is a kind of, it's a more accommodating way of thinking about that dynamic and that flow between the global and the local than simply thinking in terms of globalization. because I think it kind of is more attuned to the dynamics of power as well that are at play. So that's, I don't know, do you want to add anything to that Jamal or Flo?
Yeah, yeah, so I mean Moroccan cinema, I mean in Tamazigh, I mean the Amazon, what you call Amazon cinema, I mean it was born in the early 1990s and it was born in Algeria at the same time, but like from production to exhibition, I mean it was really like post-national in a way. I mean post-national in terms of Since in terms of fact that you know at that time it was not I mean allowed like it was not I mean like Moroccan cinema center, but also the government but also just you know regime, you know as such You know, they they had a request, you know, I was your identity and I was your culture production for so long So when those movies were being made like first ones were made almost underground And then, you know, where the money was coming from, but also like when you look at the movies, themselves, like the first movie, I mean, the Golden Woman really starts with a scene where, you know, the protagonist of the movie, you know, is arriving in his village in South West in Sousse and he's coming back, you know, from France. So like that journey really like from the global to the local and then from local to global is very different in terms of thematics, you know, of these movies.
but also its production like networks its exhibition networks they were really very diverse and they were really i mean cross-cutting between morocco and france between the like Moroccan, you know, Moroccan Amazigh and the Moroccan Berber community, but also the Amazigh diaspora in Europe and elsewhere. So national cinema framework really cannot, I mean, is not adequate to understand, I mean, Amazigh cinema, you know, both in terms of textual, I mean, play in the movies, like as text, but also in terms just of the production and exhibition, I mean, environment. Thank you. Maybe.
Yes. Matt, one more thing. If you look at the team that goes with a movie these days, it's even more so, more the case. I think Alios Carmen had a star from Argentina, is it? Anyway, Argentina.
okay all sorts of funding from elsewhere but Argentina the music was mixed in New York I mean it just goes all over the map and how then do you qualify such a movie that exceeds its borders constantly in this in this place and interplay between the local and the global Thank you. That's great. So I'm inviting Nargis to ask the first 14 questions and then I can take the ones coming up. For that thing, yes.
I was looking for a question from Marla Hammond who teaches cinema. She says that she's a big fan of Fawzi bin Saeedi's and loves to teach his film A Thousand Months. And this is partly due to the way he theorizes his own filmmaking practices in interesting and accessible ways.
And thinking about constructions of a powerful gaze. Could you point Marla towards other directors who theorize their practices so clearly? In her studies of Arabic literature, she thinks of Morocco as a powerhouse of Arabic literary theory. So does this extend to... Cinema as well.
Any one of you speakers would like to comment? Yes, I think that Moroccan cinema in recent years has provided a lot of opportunities for filmmakers from the region to come because of the number of festivals that are in the existing country. So more than 50 festivals, a lot of them supported by the Moroccan Cinema Center. And also in terms of innovation, I mean like filmmakers like Hisham Al-Asri, he's a bit like Fawzi bin Salih. He makes film but also he's like experimenting and theorizing his practice as he makes those movies.
So his movies I mean are very fun to watch but also I mean they are very raw and they invite a lot like the spectator to I mean to be very very alert okay but also really to start thinking about you know the film itself, you know, as a kind of, I mean, new way. So it's not like they are not finished products that you just watch, you know, for story or whatever. They are also, I mean, very reflexive, I mean, kinds of pieces of work.
So yeah, I don't think that Morocco is the center of film theory, like in the sense that it's the center of literary theory at the moment, but there is film criticism is happening here. So there is a lot of, I mean, healthy levels of... production in terms of books and articles published by local scholars on Moroccan cinema.
Lots of conferences are organized but I wouldn't claim that it's like the hub of film criticism. The powerhouse of the yes. I think I'd probably add to that that if you get the chance and if you enjoyed Ben Saidi's earlier work try and get to see Volubilis. most recent film because it's absolutely fantastic.
It was released a couple of years ago and scooped most of the prizes at the National Festival in Tangier but it's a really fantastic film in terms of very, you know, we consider it to be very transnational in terms of the way in which it plays with cinematic references from, you know, popular Egyptian cinema to Hitchcock and places them in a very kind of local context in terms of its engagement with Moroccan politics and kind of issues facing a younger generation so if you can if you can find a copy of that film I'd really name the film again please we can supply a list of kind of recommended films yes actually there have been some questions saying that could you there are some obviously amongst the audience who are new to the topic that almost you know three or four that you recommend people start with And another important, I think, in terms of sort of filmmaking as kind of an investigation of Morocco's film history, I think the films of Ali Asafi are really important as well, in terms of, and again we can provide some examples there, he's been very instrumental in sort of re-valorising the importance of early experimental documentary filmmaking in Morocco, of rediscovering the history of the world, and of re-discovering the history of the world. covering and renovating, you know, restoring those films. He also, his films are kind of an exploration of not only of those important documentary films but also a kind of question of what is Moroccan cinema.
So again we can put some recommendations to Ali's work as well. Very good, yeah. And the language, some people ask about the language of the film.
Is it Arabic, French, what are the languages? Well, it's in Darija now, which is the Moroccan dialect, or it is in one of the three variants of Tamazigh. Yeah, there are questions about that, yeah.
And Amin Ben Amrawi said that he had it subtitled in French but not in Arabic, and he said people understood. And there is, you know, he said, he claims that he is building on the old, very old this time, films of his childhood, which were Hindi films, in Hindi, not necessarily always dubbed or subtitled, and that everybody, and that this is in the film, I mean, this is also one of the films, by the way, Adyos Karman, that I would completely recommend, and that is... within reach, I believe, in the US, for instance, and in Europe.
And he talks about the fact that it becomes a celebration that you don't need language in some ways. It's fascinating. Your Marcus of Marcus. Yes, you're mute. I'm so sorry.
I was going to say, like the Indians in the Marlboro in the Middle East. It didn't matter. that nobody even really paused to think it was in Hindi. It didn't matter.
So you would love this film, Largess, because you will see the whole audience dancing with the people on screen and singing, even though they don't understand what they sing. Fantastic. So there are a few questions which you have asked Nargis and you have answered which in relation to the language, what language the films are in and lots of questions around Amazigh films which I think Jamal has answered in his talk.
But there is an interesting question around, for example, can you talk about some of the challenges facing Amazigh cinema in the age of globalization and maybe even before. And then in relation to that is, yeah, so it, because you talked about digital disruptions, you use that term, so perhaps you could, you could explore that a bit more. And then we'll come, and then every, you know, there is a question there about social media and film streaming networks like Netflix and FilmNow, do they constitute a challenge?
So do you consider these big behemoths of, you know, film production as being some examples of disruptions and then we'll go to other questions. Thank you. The first question I think was more about the challenges for Ramazou cinema.
Yeah it's facing a lot of challenges. So basically it started as a video cinema in 1990s. It was not funded by the government like the rest of Moroccan cinema. So therefore, you know, the films were made on very small budgets and they were, I mean, distributed locally in Agadir and the region initially, but also in diaspora in France. But then, you know, cinema really started to get a little bit more professional.
So there were more productions, but also there was even a star system for this kind of vernacular cinema. And then in the early 2000s, what happened is that, you know, piracy, I mean, almost killed the cinema. So because, you know, the cinema relied on returns on the copies of films sold so that, you know, the production company would make more movies and so on. So in the absence of any help from the government, it was difficult for the production companies to survive in the early 2000s.
So most of them really, I mean, just, you know, shut shop. So they closed shop because... they could not survive.
So films, as soon as they were made, they would be in the markets, they would be everywhere, but then one person would buy a scene, I mean like the original copy, okay the authentic copy, and then they would make lots of copies for friends and for people, and then you would also find these movies being sold everywhere in the country. So the production model simply, I mean, was disrupted by piracy in the early 2000s. Then in 2009, It was this new development in Morocco.
So the country, I mean, had been like since 2001 with the Ajdir, you know, I mean, speech of the king, where he said, you know, that Tamazigh and Amazigh identity are the backbone, you know, of national identity in Morocco. And then we need to really teach language, we need to incorporate it into the media and so on. So a TV channel, okay, Tamazigh TV channel was established in late 2009. And it has been helping, I mean, some of these film actors and filmmakers to make movies because as a TV channel it has a budget and then they are making a lot of movies for, I mean, for television.
Now more recently what's been happening is that a lot of films are made and distributed only on YouTube, okay? So a lot of these production companies now they rely on returns like ad returns like advertising on YouTube. in order to survive and make more movies. So that has been a really, I mean, kind of like the latest development in terms of Amazigh cinema and the way it is trying to survive in the age of digital disruption.
Yes, that's true. And what about funding? There are a couple of questions about government funding. Is that something that is openly available or just comes with conditions? Well, you write a scenario.
Yes, it is. The CCM has a commission that looks at scripts, evaluates the scripts, and then attributes funding or not. And then during the development, there are three or four tranches, I don't remember, three?
Four years. Four years. And then you get the money as you provide evidence that you're doing what you said you were doing.
And basically the CCM is a co-producer of most Moroccan films as a result of that. And Jamal mentioned before Nadir Boumoush, who was a filmmaker who works entirely outside of the system for precisely those reasons because he, I mean, inevitably within that context there's also an element I think of self-censorship amongst you know certain filmmakers there are kind of top certain topics that they know and red lines that they know they they that they shouldn't cross because they just won't get the films kind of approved and receive the funding from this SAM so Nadir is someone who sort of very clearly placed himself outside of that because he didn't want to compromise the you know the politics of his of his films and was someone who used the digital tools at his disposal so he went direct to YouTube and Vimeo he subtitled his films his first film My Max and Me he subtitled that in in English and distributed that online and you know was capturing tens of thousands of views, you know, more than any Moroccan documentary filmmaker could hope to get if they were sort of trying to go through, you know, theatrical release and to the point where his most recent film, Amasou, which again is another film I'd really, really recommend if you can get to see it, you see that film, whereby at the National Festival just before the the pandemic caused lockdown in Morocco as well, there was a whole question as to whether the film was going to be even be allowed to be screened at the National Festival. And in the end, there was a there was a kind of sense that the film was the film was allowed to be screened, in part because a kind of calculation was made by by by the CCM and by and by the state that there would be more sort of negative, more negative impact if that film wasn't allowed to be screened. But I think Nadir is an example of someone who's really sort of like, who has looked for alternative distribution networks to not compromise his politics and actually, you know, has been able to find a space and find an audience. And that was precisely one of the things in researching the book that we were interested in.
Where are those? alternative spaces you know and how to feel how filmmakers reach their audience um because the possibilities are there in a way like never before but but that doesn't mean that you can reach that audience you can find that audience because um it's also about the audience knowing that that film is is there right i think that comes back to something you're asking about about kind of the major streamers the netflix's and so forth um i mean the point the point there is that those those are um You know, Morocco is not alone in trying to work out how it navigates that kind of, negotiates that relationship with the new online majors like Netflix, for example. I think that, you know, there was a company called ICFlix who wanted to kind of build themselves as the Netflix of the Arab world, who seemed like they were going to be investing in Moroccan productions and this was going to be an alternative.
That really kind of crashed and burned and certain Moroccan filmmakers had a... bad experience in terms of what they felt was being guaranteed to them in terms of production and distribution i think that the the the reality of netflix as in many other countries is that they will you know they are the kind of global dominant kind of superpower of streaming they will come in and try and capture an audience but that's one of one of the difficulties they have is that that their sort of first is their kind of pricing model because the kind of pricing model that they have excludes a large part of the Moroccan audience who are not going to be able to afford that subscription and who perhaps are looking for content that Netflix doesn't actually offer. You know, this is the kind of classic experience of, you know, the sort of so-called Nollywood model, the entrepreneurial model that is entirely driven by kind of looking for its audience and in which it's kind of, it finds itself outside of that dynamic.
But yeah, I think there are issues around. you know again who the gatekeepers are still there and it's how these films can reach their audience. Yes because a big market in YouTube I think probably needs to step in and probably more accessible you know buying the films from that anyway.
May I add something? Who is one of those amazing transnational producers who is in Casablanca and has two two companies, one in Casablanca, one in Paris, is right now co-producing with somebody in Beirut, in Cairo, and I don't remember where else, is co-producing a series that is going to be made for TV very much on the Netflix model or the Amazon Prime model for Hicham Lassery. who is going to do something he's never done before, which is a series with a mixture of jars.
There'll be somebody, the story of someone who crosses the, tried to immigrate, you know, via sea and then ends up being haunted by seven dead people who died during the voyage. And so you can imagine it goes all over the place. But I find that very interesting that Lami Ashrafi is saying, okay, so we don't have Netflix right now, but let's see what the Arab world could do. And she is actually now more and more interested in having a sort of pan-Arab or pan-African system of co-production.
That's very interesting. There is a question here which I think is quite interesting because it relates to this idea of transnationalism. And the question is whether transnationalism brings about a certain disconnect between Moroccan art, including cinema production and between the locals and the local cultures and norms and the Moroccan public. Could the move from VHS to be sent into local villages to online exhibition and transnational collaboration have brought about the deterioration of the groundedness of Moroccan cinema and contributed to its disconnect.
So it might be interesting to respond to this question. And again, the question also, the person who's asking is, wants to know about the political context. How does that affect what is produced and so on?
So a lot there to talk about if you want to talk about it. Who wants to go first? You go first Will. Okay so I think that one of the points that was being made early there about that potential disconnect.
goes back to that point I think I made earlier about the relationship with the diaspora. I think that there is a tendency sometimes to feel that, particularly some of the films that are getting, you know, from within the filmmaking community in Morocco, that some of the films that are getting visibility at international festivals that are able to attract festival funding or money from Doha are films that actually circulate in a different kind of context and in a different world almost of sort of the of the international festival circuit these are auteur-led productions and films that are you know in some way disconnected. I think there can be an element of truth in that but I also think Fauzi, Ben Saeed and Hicham Lassari are examples of filmmakers whose films travel well but who I think also are very much kind of they have a what I would call a rooted transnationalism you know they're very much connected.
in terms of themes, language, approach and sort of these are not sort of, you know, diasporic filmmakers who are sort of, you know, who haven't been back to Morocco for like 20 years or something. There's very much a kind of connection there. So I think there's an element of truth within that, but it speaks also to a bigger issue about how, and Jamal has written about this before, talking about Moroccan cinema as a divided house, okay, so how do you bridge that? gap between the filmmakers who are resolutely local who look for funds only within a kind of national context either from the SESAM from private investors who are few or to from from TV um how do you kind of bridge that gap in terms of getting them to maybe collaborate creatively with with those filmmakers who are moving more circulating internationally the kind of filmmakers I talk about as Cine Este Passage but also how do we kind of How do those films that see themselves as resolutely national, but may have a potential to reach an international audience, how do those filmmakers actually have a sense that there is someone they can trust and there's a network that they actually understand to reach that international audience? So there are kind of, I think there's an element of truth in that.
And Shimon, you know, I know we've talked about this. I guess that's a question that, I mean, the film that you recommended earlier, Volubilis, by Faizi bin Saeedi, was trying to, I mean, really to solve. Like how do you make a film that is of very high quality, attracts you know festival attention, so goes on festival circuits and circulates internationally, and at the same time gets enough interest and enough audience, I mean attention, I mean in Morocco.
So I guess the problem is still there, it has not been really I mean resolved. So they're like a Moroccan cinema is remains like a divided house. So there are movies that are made.
for like for a national audience and these films are very rarely you know i mean very rarely attract the attention of festival organizers not just abroad but also in morocco because they are seen as like popular cinema cinema that is commercial and made like for film covers rather than cinema that is made to be appreciated for its aesthetic you know kind of value but i mean the problem is that ccm like i mean the enabler of Moroccan cinema in terms of funding, really encouraged that policy from the early 2000s. So they said that, you know, filmmakers are going to get funding, like especially a second time, if their previous movies, like, had attracted festival attention, so had been to good festivals abroad, or had really done well, you know, at the box office, I mean, in Morocco. So, and then they are still, like, I mean, following that kind of policy. Like... We're going to give money to certain people because we know that their films do well at the box office at home.
And then we're going to give money to these other guys, to these other tribes, because they go to Cannes, they go to Berlin, they go to these places. So that is really something that is also encouraged by the National Film Council. But it's really a divide that needs to be bridged in order to create more.
more alternatives and more diversity in the field of Moroccan cinema. Yeah, so about the political, what was the, you know, politics affect film, I guess. There are red lines in Morocco, you cannot talk against the monarchy, you cannot talk about Islam, and you cannot question the, it's called l'intégrité du territoire, meaning The territorial borders, and that includes Western Sahara. So that's something you're not supposed to... put in question.
Also, more recently, when the Islamist, the Parti Justice et Développement, the Islamist party came into power, all of a sudden there was all that talk about doing clean art, which meant that you could not really have, well, sex, but sex is not necessarily something that would happen, you know, visibly on the Moroccan screen anyway. But there are things that every, any suggestion would be completely criticized to the point that at some point we have seen, we have met filmmakers who told us, oh, we were kind of happy because the minute the parliament would say, ooh this film is terribly unclean and shouldn't be shown then then that created a buzz and then everybody would of course rush to the cinema to see it so it was in fact a wonderful way of publicizing cinema in its paradoxical fashion so yes uh politics do have some weight yeah could i just add one one more thing in relation to what jamal was saying and this kind of question of the competing i suppose competing priorities for the CCM. I think one other thing to add to that is inward investment, by which I mean Morocco as a production service location which is highly lucrative, but which doesn't really benefit the creative development of many filmmakers.
It provides a kind of source of income and employment for certain filmmakers who become part of the crew, or maybe as fixers or location scouts. But you know all of those kind of big American European productions that are coming to shoot in Morocco for the facilities and the climate and that they're bringing all their heads of departments and their directors and it's not really a kind of positive creative exchange for Moroccan filmmakers but it is highly important to the film industry and highly lucrative and so what you tend to find when Moroccan cinema is being promoted internationally at key international markets like the European film market in Berlin or the Marché International du Filme in Cannes that the Moroccan cinema stand that is there is sort of saying come and shoot in Morocco get your tax rebate you know and you know the Moroccan filmmakers are not always promoted front and center in you know but and that's understandable because this is kind of the you know it's the film business right and there's that kind of tension between art and commerce but It is also, that's another I think difficult tension that particularly the CCAM as the kind of national screen agency has trouble resolving. That is somebody just picked up on something that Florence said that, you know, the moment that there's a governmental disapproval of something, obviously that increases box office returns.
So somebody is questioning that, can they get a license for release if it is not? approved by the government. So at what point do they draw the line when something is not screened?
Well they do deliver exploitation visas so they can also not deliver them but you need to understand if the CCAM has already invested money and co-produced the film chances are and followed it the whole way chances are none of this will happen. It will get through yeah. Yeah so.
So there is a question in, you know, several questions around censorship by the system. But I think you have answered that, you know, kind of directly and indirectly. But there's another question in relation to the production and the growth of Amazigh cinema. And can you read it in relation to the official recognition of Amazigh culture and identity in the Moroccan state over the last 20 years?
Do you see that as kind of evolving together? And maybe... a question going back to the transnational question. What effect do these transnational connections and interventions and practices and so on, how do they affect the aesthetic and the kind of language or the visual kind of feeling of the films produced in Morocco?
So two questions in one, as we're kind of running close to time. Jamal, Amazigh expert, go for it. Okay, yeah, I think in terms of Amazigh cinema, I mean, what's been happening over the last 20 years in terms of political, I mean, recognition of Tamazigh as an official language in the constitution of 2011. So now in Morocco, we have two official languages, so Arabic and Tamazigh. Although Tamazigh has not been like, is still, I mean, really not implemented as an official language in terms of... media in terms of teaching and so on.
So in teaching for example it's not yet generalized, okay? So they're saying that next year they are going to really to generalize it. But I guess in terms of filmmaking, for the first time in Moroccan history in 2007, National Film Festival, 2008, sorry, National Film Festival in Tangier invited an Amazigh filmmaker to come and screen his film, to Mohamed Ghamish, with his film Tillila. And then for his next film, so for that film that he screened at the National Film Festival, he didn't get any funding from CCM, but for his next film he got funding, okay?
And then more filmmakers like, I mean, Ibn Amrawi, and then also filmmakers who have made, like Talha Hadid and others, I mean, they have received funding from, like, CCM, although there are complaints that there is still a lot of discrimination against Amazon Films. So... Every year there is only one film or so that gets funding and the other films are all in Indonesia. So there is still a lot of, I mean, way to go, I mean, in that regard.
Yeah, so I think that the recognition of language, the recognition of culture by the government has helped, you know, Amazon filmmakers feel that they are like part of the, I mean, part of the of national cinema, but also that they are, I mean, welcome to make it. productions without worrying about being censored, about going to jail and so on. But in terms of censorship, I think I need to just add something that it also depends of course on the political environment, but it also depends on the man or the woman, we haven't had a woman yet, at the top of CCM. So for many years, like from 2003 to 2014 I guess. So there was a man at the top of the same, he died recently unfortunately, Mr. Nordin Sayin.
He was an intellectual but he was also very charismatic and knew people in power and so on. And he used that power to protect filmmakers from censorship, from political parties in the government, or even from the regime itself. So he was somebody who defended the freedom of expression and allowed people like Hisham Asri.
to make movies talking about the king, talking about the ministry of the interior, talking about all sorts of taboos. But then that changed. The Islamists became the main part in the coalition in 2011. And of course, they went after Nordin Sayyed and removed him from CCM finally in 2014 and put a man in his place by the name of Salim Fasil Fihri.
And then, you know, the number of like cases of censorship just has gone up okay like even for sometimes for movies that they save i mean some funding from ccm so he shall lastly lord i mean have all complained about you know censorship of their movies or sometimes of one of the installments of funding that goes towards the production of their i mean of their movies so yeah goodwill of one person at top of like in a key position But Jamal, without going into Morocco, Moroccan stories, it seems to me that, you know, Sarim Fasifiri is sort of imposed upon by the minister above him, no? I mean, I can't quite fight against him. Yeah, it's the same as under the Ministry of Communication, now the Minister of Culture. Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, we seem to be running out of time. time, but there were a few questions that maybe you could kind of talk to in very brief ways. The question around, you know, Moroccan cinema or Moroccan cinemas in the plural, and then whether there is something that we could call Moroccan cinema, you know, and really is it part of Arab cinema, is it African and so on. So all these questions, you know, sort of, you know, kind of engage with the importance of the topic.
You know, the fact that you have a field of work that can be called, you know, a field of work around Moroccan cinema is really exciting. But these are very big questions, I guess, and we are really running out of time and really apologize for my internet It just knocked me out for a few minutes and I apologize to the brilliant questions coming from the audience Nargis is the brilliant person here who can put them in perhaps a document Yes, and Aki does usually, yes, because you might like to actually have some of these Really very interesting questions, yeah we'll copy and paste them for you. And we can send back the list of...
We'd love that, yes please, there have been several questions saying could you please recommend your half a dozen tops, absolutely yeah. I also want to watch them and then try to find them to students to look at and discuss. But this has been such a fascinating...
talk and I think the format for Gillian, to have the three of you, it kind of looked really well and you know loads of issues and questions and understandings of the marking context so thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us and have a good evening, afternoon, whatever. Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure, really lovely to have you.
Thanks and thanks to all the audience. Okay bye all. Bye.
Okay bye. Thank you. Bye bye.
Thank you so much. Bye bye.