Moroccan cinema records fewer local hits
Black comedy ‘Dallas’ tops with 105, 764 admissions in 2016
LOS ANGELES, Dec 2, (RTRS): Since film-loving King Mohamed VI ascended to the throne in 1999, Moroccan cinema has received significant state support — enabling the country to spawn one of the most dynamic national film industries in the Arab world, with significant international festival presence and a regular number of domestic hits.
However, in 2016, against the backdrop of a sliding box-office, the national film industry has clocked up fewer local successes than in recent years.
Admissions until September, 2016, at 982,648 tickets sold, are 28 percent lower than the same period in 2015, and considering the third quarter alone, entries have virtually halved between 2015 and 2016. The admissions slide has been driven in part by continued closure of the few remaining cinemas in Morocco, and also by a lower number of popular local films that have attracted audiences to local screens.
This year’s biggest local hit, with 105,764 admissions, is a local black comedy about the film business, “Dallas” by Mohamed Ali El Majboud. In the film, the director decides to make a movie to avoid bankruptcy, but his main actor dies of a heart attack during the shoot and he is obliged to complete the film with the man’s dead body.
The only other Moroccan film in the country’s top ten is Aziz El Jahidi’s “Chambra 13”, a dramedy about rebellious female inmates in a Moroccan prison, which clocked up 26,045 admissions.
The third biggest local film — ranking No. 13 at the national box office, with 17,332 admissions — is Said Khallaf’s “A Mile in My Shoes”, which won the Grand Prix in the Tangier National Film Festival and is Morocco’s official entry for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
“Mile” is a tense social drama about a marginalized and impoverished young boy living in Casablanca who decides to take revenge on the dog-eat-dog world around him.
Placing 14th place at the national box office, with 16,331 admissions, is Algerian-Moroccan road-movie, “La vache”, by Algerian director, Mohamed Hamidi. Starring Lambert Wilson, the pic is about an Algerian farmer who travels with his prize cow, Jacqueline, to the Salon de l’Agriculture in Paris.
Ahmed Boulane’s comedy “La isla de perejil”, about a diplomatic dispute between Morocco and Spain, which screened in Marrakech in 2015, was the only other Moroccan film to make the top 30.
The success of local films in 2016 is significantly below that recorded in 2015, which saw five local films in the top ten, including the country’s two biggest hits — Abdellah Toukona Ferkous’ “Le Coq” (The Cock) and Said Naciri’s “Les Transporteurs” (The Transporters).
Reasons for underperformance in 2016 included the fact that many leading Moroccan helmers — such as Nabil Ayouch, Noureddine Lakhmari, Hicham Lasri, Faouzi Bensaidi, Leila Kilani and Narjiss Nejjar — will only have their films released in 2017 — which is expected to be a much stronger year for Moroccan cinema.
Nonetheless, Moroccan cinema fared considerably better on the festival circuit in 2016.
Hicham Lasri followed up from his black-and-white tragi-comedy, “The Sea is Behind” — which world preemed in Berlin in 2015 — with “Starve your Dog”, which had its world premiere in Toronto in 2015 and screened in Berlin in 2016.
Lasri is one of the country’s most distinctive helmers, in terms of both his visual style and experimental storytelling technique.
“Sea” takes its name from a battle cry by Moorish leader Tarik Ibn Ziad at the time of the conquest of Andalusia in Spain during the Crusades, which is cited in the film. The stark, high-contrast, black-andwhite film follows the bittersweet adventures of transvestite Tarik.
Lasri has stated that his objective with “Sea” was to show how Moroccan society is moving from tolerance to intolerance, for example a man dressing as a woman in the context of certain marriage traditions was relatively commonplace in the country around 15 years ago, but is now viewed by some as aberrant.
Lasri’s “Starve your Dog” is an experimental film-essay style, whose freeform montage is reminiscent of the French nouvelle vague. Like his previous outings, the film includes biting social criticism, including a simulated interview with Driss Basri (Jirari Ben Aissa), former Interior Minister, during the “Years of Lead” under King Hassan II, who mockingly refers to himself as the “Monster of the Interior”. The true-life minister died in exile in Paris in 2007, but in “Dog” he is still alive and emerges from house arrest, as a specter of the old regime, returning to the present.
Another major festival success in 2016 was “Mimosas” — a coproduction between Spain, Morocco, France and Qatar, by Moroccanbased Spanish director, Oliver Laxe. The minimalist travelogue and crypto-Western, which is named after a Tangier cafe where false touristic guides procure lost souls, won the Grand Prize at Cannes Critics’ Week in 2016. The pic is divided into three sections named after different elements of Islamic prayer.