Masrah Ennas
Actualités marocaines
Morocco, 1974, 6 min, DCP, B&W, French
Aita
Izza Genini
Morocco, 1987, 26 min, DCP, colour, Arabic-French
Transes
Ahmed El Maanouni
Morocco, 1981, 88 min, DCP, colour, Arabic
Of all the art forms in 1970s and 80s Morocco, music was perhaps the most potent, aesthetically and politically. Nass El Ghiwane was an iconic band, both for the way they reclaimed and renewed a specifically Moroccan music rooted in African musical traditions, and for the way they voiced people’s freedom dreams. By devoting a film to them in which the band’s members are shown in their humble quotidianness, El Maanouni painted the poignant portrait of a generation. Transes’ producer, Izza Genini, would later direct her own musical films, in the form of an ample series of shorts devoted to different genres of traditional Moroccan music. The first one, Aita, is a portrait of legendary cheikha Fatna Bent Lhoucine, and was co-edited by Ahmed Bouanani. To introduce the session, we screen a brief feature on Tayeb Saddiki’s “masrah ennas” [People’s theater]. Saddiki pioneered a modern form of musical theater, which gave Nass El Ghiwane their early training in the 1960s. He is also the author of a feature film, Zeft (1984), which was produced by Genini.
