None of the 1942 classic Casablanca
was actually shot in Casablanca. It
was filmed on a Hollywood back lot,
and the Rick’s Café Américain set
was based on the historic El-Minzah
hotel in Tangier.How big is Bollywood in Morocco? In
2005, more than a third of the movies
shown in Morocco were Bollywood
films, and a 2008 Casablanca
screening of Chalte Chalte starring
Shah Rukh Kahn with an in-person
appearance by co-star Rani Mukherjee
drew 50,000 devoted fans.
filmography, the country had golden moments on the silver screen in Hitchcock’s The Man Who
Knew Too Much, Orson Welles’ Othello and David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia .
Morocco has certainly proved its versatility: it stunt-doubled
for Somalia in Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, Tibet in Martin
Scorsese ’ s Kundun, and Lebanon in Stephen Gaghan’s
Syriana, and Inception’s Kenyan dreamscape was actually
Tangier. Morocco also stole the show right out from under John
Malkovich by playing itself in Bernardo Bertolucci ’ s The
Sheltering Sky , and untrained local actors Mohamed Akhzam
and Boubker Ait El Caid held their own with Cate Blanchett and
Brad Pitt in the 2006 Oscar-nominated Babel .
Morocco’s Directorial Breakthrough
Historically, Morocco has imported its blockbusters from Bollywood, Hollywood and Egypt – but
today, Moroccans are getting greater opportunity to see films shot in Morocco that are actually
by Moroccans and about Morocco. The home-grown film industry produced 18 feature films
and 80 shorts in 2010, compared with four features and six shorts in 2004.
Moroccan filmmakers are putting decades of Ouallywood filmmaking craft and centuries of
local storytelling tradition to work telling epic modern tales, often with a cinéma-vérité edge.
Morocco’s 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar contender was Nour-Eddine Lakhmari’s Casanegra,
about Casablanca youth thinking fast and growing up faster as they confront the darker aspects
of life in the White City. Other recent hits include Latef Lahlou’s 2010 La Grand Villa, tracking
one couple’s cultural and personal adjustments after relocating from Paris to Casablanca.
Euro-Moroccan films have already become mainstays of the
international festival circuit, notably Faouzi Bensaïdi’s family-
history epic A Thousand Months, winner of the 2003 Cannes
Film Festival Premier Regard, and Leila Marrakchi’s Marock,
about a Muslim girl and Jewish boy who fall in love, winning Un
Certain Regard at Cannes in 2005. With their stylish handling of
colliding personal crises in 2007’s Heaven’s Doors , 20-
something Spanish-Moroccan directors Swel and Imad Noury
are hitting the festival circuit with The Man Who Sold the
World, a Dostoyevsky-existentialist fable set in Casablanca.
Thanks to critical acclaim and government support, new voices and new formats are
emerging in Moroccan cinema. A 2009 film-festival favourite, Hakim Belabbes’ feature-length
documentary Ashlaa (In Pieces) collages 10 years of footage of the director’s extended family
into a compelling family portrait. Women directors have stepped into the spotlight, from Farida
Benlyazid’s 2005 hit A Dog’s Life of Juanita Narboni, a Spanish expat’s chronicle of Tangier
from the 1930s through to the 1960s, to rising star Mahassine El Hachadi, who won the short-
film prize at the 2010 Marrakesh International Film Festival while still in film school. Young
directors are finding their voices through a new film school in Marrakesh and short-film
showcases, including back-to-back short-film festivals in Rabat and Tangier in October.