Session 1. Colonial Nights

Tetuán, la blanca
Arturo Pérez Camarero
Spain, 1943, 15 min, DCP, B&W, Spanish

La fugue de Mahmoud
Roger Leenhardt
France, 1952, 33 min, DCP, B&W, French

Amghar
Mostafa Derkaoui
Poland, 1968, 4 min, DCP, B&W, silent

Mémoire 14
Ahmed Bouanani
Morocco, 1971, 25 min, DCP, B&W, French

Petite histoire en marge du cinématographe
Ahmed Bouanani
Morocco, 1973, 6 min, DCP, colour, B&W, French

In Morocco, the birth of cinema is inseparable from colonial conquest. The first cameras arrived alongside European armies and their tanks. In addition to propaganda reels documenting the invasion and its aftermath, Morocco soon became the site of a prolific film production. In it, for the most part, the natives appeared only as extras, and were excluded from access to technical or artistic training. Because of the absence of a precolonial tradition of figurative representation, decades of colonial filmmaking imposed a lasting orientalist image of the country and its people, which influenced even the way Moroccans saw themselves. For Ahmed Bouanani, the task of the first generation of Moroccan filmmakers was to recalibrate the gaze, to re-learn how to look at their fellow citizens and their native landscapes, in order to counter the hegemony of colonial representation. That is what he attempted in Mémoire 14, for instance, by literally decomposing and resequencing French propaganda reels in a way that makes them tell the story otherwise.