For a Fictional Essay. Film conference with Léa Morin

25th September 1967, Karim Idriss, a young Moroccan filmmaker wrote a letter to the rector of the Lodz Film School in Poland. It was an application for admission. In it, he set out his career and his present struggles for a Moroccan cinema, something in which he was actively participating. A few years later he wrote a letter to the Moroccan Journal of Culture, Souffles, about his documentary (which would be banned) Les enfants du Haouz (1970), a free speech film about the marginalised adolescents in Morocco. Despite extensive enquiries, we have been unable to trace this film, the same is true for the last film made in Poland by Karim: Et l’exil de tous les jours.

Based on these two letters, on missing films, on documents, photos, archives and dozens of film clips and rushes, we will talk of films that will never be screened: films not yet traced, lost, banned, destroyed, unfinished films, rushes and even films still at the project stage or simply ideas. They will take us from Poland to Iraq, from the Berrechid psychiatric hospital to the Port of Casablanca, from the Hay Mohammadi shanty towns towards the rural regions of the country. There are still traces of these movements. Labels on a reel, a camera model on a photo shoot, a student's diploma, a few lines in a CV or in a press article, and images exhumed bit by bit.
How can things be pieced together from this material? How can these tentative fragments be reassembled? How can one possibly think about writing a story for the cinema when it carries a series of erosions, omissions, deletions and disappearances? How can one include uncertainty, attempts and trial and error? How is it possible to preserve these films that do not exist? Would it be possible to make use of film restoration methodologies in order to preserve traces of the absent? What place should this work directed at political and aesthetic recomposition be given in fiction? Is it possible to restore and rekindle today the desire to make films and the dreams of revolution embraced by these young filmmakers in order to propose the invention of new spaces for our futures? And if the archives were actually spaces for re-invention?...

Léa Morin

This presentation will specifically use extracts from films digitized by Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola within the framework of the partnership with Punto de Vista.