Lekcja 41
Abdellah Drissi
Poland, 1966, 7 min, DCP, B&W, Polish
Adoption
Mostafa Derkaoui
Poland, 1968, 4 min, DCP, B&W, Polish
Zofia et Ludmila
Hamid Bensaid
Poland, 1971, 9 min, DCP, B&W, Polish
Elzbieta K
Idriss Karim
Poland, 1973, 12 min, DCP, B&W, Polish
Alyam, Alyam
Ahmed El Maânouni
Morocco, 1978, 80 min, DCP, colour, Arabic
This screening brings together Ahmed El Maanouni’s first feature, shot in Morocco’s countryside, and a set of shorts made by four Moroccan directors while students in Łódź, where they were mentored by such documentary film greats as Kazimierz Karabasz. Alas, the remarkable political and aesthetic maturity of these student films remained a suspended promise: when they returned to Morocco, censorship and the marginalization of the documentary genre forced them to change course. Despite formal and contextual differences, all the films in this session draw us closer to the inner labyrinths of people experiencing forms of social exile. Perhaps due to their own status as new immigrants in Poland, in addition to their radical political commitments, Drissi, Derkaoui, Karim and Bensaid gravitated toward situations of racial discrimination, material poverty, and social marginalization. In Alyam, Alyam, El Maânouni films the ordinary life of rural Moroccans in a way that allows us to experience its cadence —all the while focusing on a young man whose sense of internal exile makes him fiercely want to leave the country.
