Meetings 2024

For at least two decades, awards and programming in major festivals provide tangible evidence that national cinematography is undergoing a phase of fruitful experimentation and exploration. Alongside relevant and necessary praise and celebration, below are some observations and suggestions for general inquiries that may provide perspective on the phenomenon, perhaps indicating a relative but real breakthrough.

1/ : The programming of The Complete Works of Faouzi Bensaïdi, including his short and feature films – a first in the history of festivals in Morocco – will be accompanied and punctuated by a roundtable bringing together critics and researchers invited to decipher a singular and plural trajectory and universe. With the generous and complicit assistance of the author of «La Falaise» (1999), «Trajets» (2000), «Le Mur» (2000), and «Mille Mois» (2003), this sequence, conceived in two parts, aims to create an interface, along with the screening of recent Moroccan auteur films, capable of helping to identify the main lines of an ongoing oeuvre.
In his latest work: «Cinema Tested by Diversity: Politics of Gaze» (2021), Jean Michel Frodon, a longtime friend of the Mediterranean Film Festival, refers, in connection with the context of Morocco and elsewhere, to the name of Noureddine Saïl, former director of the Moroccan Cinematographic Center, who, as the bearer and defender of a major South-South project, also bet on the coupling: Quantity/ Quality in the hearth of a potential third space on the margins of the Center(s). The hearth, for the cinema of «industrial flows» (Olivier Assayas). Cinema 3 is the title of the magazine of which N.S. was the founder and editor-in-chief. Doesn’t the new impetus of trials and quests in national cinematography fit into a zone of interstitial type and nature? The analysis and extension brought by J.M.F’s book from cinematographies from the five continents seem to pave the way for what is increasingly being sought in terms of firmer, more nuanced, and subtle directions towards established, dominant film genres.

By closely apprehending the nature of the deficiencies suffered by cinema(s) of the South(s), particularly in terms of aesthetic emancipations, the former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma refers to the aforementioned Quantity/Quality couple through the example of Nollywood (Nigeria) and Bollywood (Bombay), which, primarily targeting their respective national audiences and diasporas, refer to a duo that remains largely unconstrained to associate with the issues of a global cinema about which they care very little. This is indeed what their promoters do, harping on the indisputable popularity of the formula to invoke the famous conversion of quantity into quality, a conversion even less likely to occur as it is only marginally an issue or horizon for Nollywood products.

Focusing on the unique double quantitative explosion experienced in Anglophone Africa, the critic emphasizes, despite the «lack of issue and horizon,» the presence of ambivalence in relation to: «film genres (which), in other circumstances, have given rise to great works but belonging to the genre system is by no means a guarantee.» Wouldn’t the bet be on the creative and evolutionary relationship of films, among other things, to the said genres, ultimately meaning films themselves as much as to the audience(s) here and elsewhere?

With the recent release of Faouzi Bensaïdi’s latest feature film, «Déserts,» whose (sub)title in Arabic is «A-Toultoû Al-Khâlî,» «Empty Third,» the same critic advances on his web journal: «In the various ways of occupying these spaces, and filming them, F.B. turns his biting comedy into an epic western with astonishing poetic ease… Love drama and relentless vengeance find, in this desert similar and different from the one traversed by the car of the two guys at the beginning, a breath of direction gesture, offering access to a multidimensional world. And this is the richness of this cinema proposal, both open and intense.» The essentially triadic relationship between Cinema: type of gaze on westerns, comedy, tragedy, Memory: autobiographical, cinephilic, and Space: place of cities, deserts, and other meticulously identified and/or built locations would constitute for the author of «Summer Days» (2022) the hearth of such high and permanent tensions, «offering access to a multidimensional world.» J.M.F.’s assessment seems all the more accurate as it approaches F.B.’s new film in resonance with two feature films, one Finnish, «Les feuilles mortes» by Ari Kaurismäki, the other Vietnamese, «L’Arbre aux papillons d’or» by Pham Tien An: «Three films, three wonderful gifts, which there is no reason to compare, let alone to put in competition.
In addition to the absolute singularity of each, there is this additional good news that they together carry, the unpredicted diversity of what they are, if not representatives, at least symptoms… Together, they testify to the global vitality of film creation, especially if, unlike what 90% of the media and officials do, we do not focus solely on the United States and France.»

Beyond the often restrictive, suffocating coupling: North vs. South, the three Cannes films have the status of three relatively rare pieces expanding the territory of «complex dynamics and exciting issues for those interested in the artistic and intellectual life of world cinema,» emphasizes the one who, by bringing together filmmakers from diverse cultural backgrounds, formulates the elements of a critical approach capable of inspiring and broadening that of our authors whose films testify to a real and persevering effort of acclimatization to the cinema(s) of the country. Films often caught in a logic of «separate,» «conjunctural,» «polemical,» and almost exclusively «individual» approaches… preventing them from being seen as hearths of singular, collective, and more or less common generic and thematic processes.
2/ : Here are some proposals and suggestions for thematic axes and issues for our invited guests, critics, and researchers:
– Your approach and appreciation of Faouzi Bensaïdi’s career? The singularity and/or universality of his filmography taken as a whole and/or from one of his films approached as a more or less autonomous entity? Real and/or potential resonances of the filmography of the author of «Mille Mois» with the «new cinemas» of authors, here and/or elsewhere?
– Status report on Moroccan cinema and films of the current decade?
– Thematic, generic, and other convergences and/or divergences between «pioneer» and «young» filmmakers?
– In view of the apparently endemic absence of audiences «unified» by a structured national cinema hall park, what are the perspectives, especially in the age of platforms, in terms of creation and/or reception?
– «Chances» and/or «risks» of «foreign» partnership in production?

Former editor-in-chief of the magazine Cinéma 3, a title praised by Roland Barthes in the dedication of his essay:Le troisième sens (1971), Nourredine Saïl made a mark in 2019. During an interview on the state of national cinema amidst the recent global health crisis, he paused to reflect on Eric Rohmer’s cinematic experience, citing the DVD of the feature film Pauline at the Beach (1983): Small budget, big ideas for a grand film, he essentially said to his interlocutor. This «freeze frame» was surprising given the rare presence of E.R. in the cinephile references cherished by N.S.
The author, a pioneering member of the French New Wave, seems to occupy the position of a prototype capable of meeting the challenges of a context where young national production has been seriously threatened. Eric Rohmer’s name is put forward as a possible, viable path for any peripheral cinema in search of autonomy. A third way to bypass the weight of a center now reproducing itself in industrial flow (Olivier Assayas)? Yet, «what will become of a world where chance – and by extension grace and miracles – have been eliminated?» wonders a young Rohmerian, Rhûsuke Hamaguchi from South Korea, author of the feature film titled nothing less than Tales of Chance and Other Fantasies (2023)? The notion of chance is, let us note, embedded in the etymology of the Arabic language, combining zâhra, rose, star, Venus, and a dice game called زهر , zâhr.
Confronted with a body of work consisting of «miniaturized and crystalline» universes (Gilles Deleuze), the central objective of the colloquium is to invite our speakers to share how they apprehend the place and scope of a singular cinematic experience realized between Center and Periphery, Craftsmanship, Art and Technique, Culture, History, and Seasons. Eric Rohmer, a cinematographic legacy both classic and contemporary, is he not the name of one of the major challenges for filmmakers from the South(s)?