Marrakech Film Festival

This is old news, but got buried over the holidays.

The Marrakech Film Festival took over town for nine days in the beginning of December with yellow billboards throughout the city. Occupancy rates at hotels surged to 100%, and restaurants normally quiet were booked solid. The festival is of growing importance in it’s 6th year, but still doesn’t generate sales - the real mark of a festival being a leader rather than a follower on the festival circuit. We attended expecting to find a wide array of international film-goers, and found the festival dominated by the French, as though this is a long weekend party for them.

The festival celebrated classic Italian films this year, but since we don’t speak Italian, we gave the selection a miss, and also missed most of the films screened in tribute to Susan Sarandon. (“Thelma & Louise,” we should mention, holds up much better than anticipated.)

All the films in the main competition screened at the Palais des Congres, which is an enormous convention center on Boulevard Mohammed VI. For the months leading up to the festival, we’ve seen workers putting in plants and fountains down the middle of the grand boulevard. In the past weeks, the intensity increased and armies of men in jumpsuits were applying fresh coats of paint to the curbs as people were already arriving.

It was a treat to see “Babel,” which we’d skipped when it played at the Megarama. Somehow, to see a film called “Babel” (which centers on ideas of communication and miscommunication and is acted in English, Spanish, Japanese, sign language, Arabic and Berber) dubbed into French seemed to miss the point. A large chunk of the film was shot in Morocco, and the film’s director, Alejandro González Iñárritu was on hand to introduce the film, along with the Moroccan cast. The biggest applause came at a scene most Americans wouldn’t even notice. When a helicopter finally arrives to take the Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt characters to safety, Pitt offers the Moroccan guide who had helped them through the ordeal a handful of cash. The guide refuses the money in a modest, “I was just doing my duty,” gesture, the audience of 2000+ erupted in applause and cheers. In a country where many tourists see hands outstretched and hustlers looking for any chance to take advantage, the audience was more than thrilled to see a potrayal of another type of Moroccan. Before and after the screening, we saw the Moroccan actors being descended upon by autograph seeking fans.

There’s a lot of foreign film production in Morocco, but we know next to nothing, well, really nothing, about local Moroccan films. We made it a point to seek out local films and saw a pair of interesting pictures. “Wake Up, Morocco” was a soccer- (OK, football-) themed film exhorting people to seize the day and take charge of their own lives and futures. Not the most nuanced work, but an interesting piece, which gave credit and thanks to numerous members of the royal family. For a country whose unofficial motto often seems to be Inshallah, it was a welcome treat. The star-crossed lovers in “WWW. What a Wonderful World” were a hitman and a traffic cop, and while the film was slick and commercial, it showed a slice of contemporary life in Casablanca that we’re not used to seeing on screen.

We hope the organizers add some of the panels and filmmaker Q&As that help make festivals in the U.S. so much fun, and that programmers continue to search out compelling films from Morocco and throughout the Arab world.