Literature & Cinema - Morocco - page 919

Euro-Moroccan films have already become mainstays of the international festival cir-
cuit, notably Faouzi Bensaïdi's family-history epic A Thousand Months, winner of the
2003 Cannes Film Festival Le Premier Regard, and Laïla Marrakchi's Marock, about a
Muslim girl and Jewish boy who fall in love, which screened at Cannes in 2005. With
their stylish handling of colliding personal crises in 2006's Heaven's Doors, twentyso-
mething Spanish-Moroccan directors Swel and Imad Noury hit the festival circuit with
The Man Who Sold the World, a Dostoyevsky-existentialist fable set in Casablanca.
Thanks to critical acclaim and government support, new voices and new formats are
emerging in Moroccan cinema. Young directors are finding their voices through a new
film school in Marrakesh and short-film showcases, including back-to-back short-film
festivals in Rabat and Tangier in October. A 2009 film-festival favourite, Hakim
Belabbes' feature-length documentary Ashlaa (In Pieces) collages 10 years of footage of
the director's extended family into a compelling family portrait. Women directors have
stepped into the spotlight, from Farida Benlyazid's 2005 hit The Dog's Life of Juanita
Narboni, a Spanish expat's chronicle of Tangier from the 1930s to the 1960s, to rising star
Mahassine El Hachadi, who won the short-film prize at the 2010 Marrakesh International
Film Festival while still in film school. Leila Kilani's Les Yeux Secs (2003) broke further
ground by not only being filmed in Amazigh rather than Arabic, but tackling hard subjects
like female trafficking and prostitution. The use of social critique and even occasional
nudity has brought criticism from Moroccan Islamists - with film-makers unafraid to push
back in the name of artistic freedom.