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anakinsafterlife · 9 months ago

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Thoughts on Dune Part 2

All right, friends. Dune Part 2. I absolutely picked the wrong time to start wanting to return to Tumblr, since I'm currently in the thick of Ramadan, but c'est la vie. I'm a bit worried that if I don't review now that I might forget my specific impressions of the movie, though I have to say that if this weren't Ramadan that I absolutely would be going back to see it again in the cinema, which says a lot considering that it's been at least ten years since I've actually wanted to go back and repeat a film instead of just waiting for it to come out on streaming/DVD.

So the movie is good. It is in fact very, very good. It's the Empire Strikes Back of the Dune duology (possibly trilogy), and (much like Empire) in terms of cinematography, music, scripting and acting it's nearly flawless. There are, however, issues, things that might not occur to a majority-Western audience but which are immediately clear to anyone who either comes from an Arab or Muslim background.

What follows here is a deep dive into some of the historical and cultural sources of Dune and some of the ways in which the movie producers, and in some cases fans, have failed to acknowledge those sources.

First of all, it's obvious that the Fremen are meant to be based on the Arabs, but of the the entire main cast there is only ONE actor with an Arab background, and that is Souhaila Yacoub, the half-Tunisian actress who plays Shishakli, the female Fremen warrior who is executed by the Harkonnens. Now, I have to say that this woman was fantastic. Her attitude is completely on point for an Arab, especially a North African Arab: forceful, loud, a bit brash and mocking even under fire. Nicely done. Points to the producers there, but I have to take that point away again because she is literally the only Space Arab who is actually Arab. Javier Bardem, the Spanish actor who plays Stilgard, does have some interesting moments and one of the reasons why I feel that the screenwriters were advised on Arabic traditions/culture. The incident during which he warns Paul about the Jinn in the desert like it's a joke but then immediately turns extremely serious when Paul starts smiling is so in character for an Arab and honestly just a brilliant bit of scripting, but much of the time he also acted more or less like what people *think* a fanatical religious Arab acts like--loud, frantic and unstable.

Not only this, but the "Muslim" behaviour/traditions in the film are at best...vague. People are praying, but in any direction at all. I do realize that this would be a complicated issue on another planet, where the Ka'aba couldn't be pointed to, but there are Islamic rulings for EVERYTHING. Check out the one about praying in space:

Even if they had as a society simply picked a random direction for prayer, they should all be praying at the same time and in the same direction (they seem to do this in larger crowds, but not in the smaller group where we first see people praying). They also definitely shouldn't be talking during prayer or trying to make other people talk to them during prayer (as Chani does), since talking breaks your prayer and you have to start over all over again (during obligatory prayers).

Language, too, is an issue, and a big one, because while I do understand that a conlang was developed for use in this movie, the linguists consulted did know that the language was meant to be heavily influenced by Arabic. Consequently, they've included a lot of fragmentary Arabic in their work. Unfortunately this Arabic is poorly pronounced at best, to the point where I was looking words up and laughing at what they're meant to be based on. For example, "Shai Hulud," the word for the Worms, is based on the Arabicشيء خلود, which means "immortal thing," and should be pronounced with "shai" rhyming with "say" followed by a glottal stop, and the 'h' in "Hulood" is actually a guttural sound like the infamous "ch" in Bach, followed by a long U. Another example is Mua'dib مهذب , a real word in Arabic that means "teacher," but is is actually pronounced with a "th" sound instead of a d and emphasis on the second syllable, not on the last as in French. (Note: I made an error here. There is a word مؤدب , pronounced mostly the same in the movie, but with a glottal stop after the 'u' sound and a short 'i' after the d sound rather than a long vowel, that is usually used to mean polite, urbane, gentlemanly, etc. but which can also mean teacher, although I have never heard it used in this context) "Usul", أصول, Paul's other Fremen name, was likely not, as I had previously guessed, based on the word "Rasool," meaning Prophet, but on أصول الفقه the Principles of islamic Jurisprudence, which also ties directly into a religious/prophetic them. Again, this is pronounced on the long vowel, so with a short first U and a long second U.

I've included the Arabic spellings in here, by the way, so that you can drop them into Google translator and hear how they actually sound.

Now, I do realize that the story itself is set 8000 years in the future and that spoken Arabic as a language would have changed considerably in that time, if it existed still at all, but Arabic is a liturgical language as well as a vehicle for conversation, and Muslims all across the world today use it as a tool for worship. Muslims who have no cultural connection with Arabic often still learn it in order to connect more deeply with religious traditions and simply to perform prayers and other religious duties. Religious scholars consider it to be a necessary duty of the Muslim to learn at least some Arabic:

And keep in mind that the Arabic spoken today across the MENA region is very different (and different in different places) to the Arabic spoken 1400 years ago by the Prophet Mohamed (peace be upon him). Given Islamic traditions, the chances of the Fremen using liturgical/classical Arabic for their worship would be quite high, even if their spoken language had evolved past the point of being recognizably Arabic.

Keep in mind, also, that Dune as a whole is an allegory for colonialism, economic exploitation of poorer nations (or making rival nations poor through the same), as well as dehumanization of the views and needs of native peoples in order to make that exploitation palatable to the occupying forces (I thought that this was done quite smartly in Jessica's part of the story; although she is sympathetic to the Fremen, she feels that manipulating their religious traditions is the best way to protect her son, and in doing so she allows herself to dehumanize the people who come to rely on her).

It is, therefore, incumbent upon us not to distance ourselves too much from the intended message by claiming that Dune is fiction and need not too accurately reflect the culture and religion of the people that the Fremen are so clearly based on. The fact that the producers have done little to hire Arab actors or induced any real effort to accurately pronounce the Arabic words or accurately portrayal Islamic practices seems to indicate that they are concerned about identifying too closely with the economic and cultural struggle between East and West, properly because they fear the potential economic backlash, and this despite the fact that Frank Herbert clearly wrote his book to illustrate the fallout of that struggle.

Here is a wonderful article written by a culturally Arab woman:

There are numerous other articles addressing the same issues, but I like this one because it's written by a Muslim woman, who also addresses the "hijab cosplaying" in the movie. I didn't get into that much, but I definitely recognize that it's a problem when Muslim women worry about potential violence while wearing hijab in the streets of Western nations, but the same article of clothing is fetishized in movies and fashion.

I've also seen some comment about the Mahdi mention in particular. This is a saviour-figure in Islam who will come near the end of the world. There is no emphasis on this figure in Sunni Islam, but Shias seem to have a significant body of literature concerning this figure and, from what I understand, believe that he may perhaps have already come, and so there has been some poor reception in that community to applying the label of Mahdi to Paul. Criticisms ranging from insensitivity to outright blasphemy have been levelled regarding this usage. Now, there was some tip-toeing around the prophetic theme in Dune, and rightly so, I believe, since the Prophet Mohamed is the "seal of the prophets" in Islam, meaning the last and final. The fact that Paul was essentially set up as a false prophet by the Bene Gesserit does avoid some of the potential fallout from this, and also makes sense of Chani's rejection at the end of the film, since she felt strongly about Paul acting as a false Prophet.

Again, I am aware that there is internal cosmology within the series itself, and that some fans object to the religion of the Fremen being referred to as Islam, but when the inspiration for the entire ethnicity, religion, and the natural resources at stake are as clear as they are in this series, it's also futile to expect that people will not draw those associations, nor that people belonging to the religion or ethnic group in question may not acknowledge the beauty of the movie, the gorgeous cinematography, rousing music, and tightly plotted story, but still take exception to what is clearly Orientalism.

And it is frankly such a shame that we have to place this movie under that header, because the story of Dune is so sympathetic to the Middle East and its peoples, and as I said in the beginning I actually loved the film and found it very beautiful. It was also exciting to see Islamic themes used creatively in mainstream media, but while Frank Herbert clearly wrote the story as an exposition on the exploitation of natural resources, particularly oil, in the MENA region, the truth is that the racism and exploitation that he was protesting are very much alive today and contribute to the oppression of millions. It's particularly disappointing to see the message of the movie sail over the heads of people watching it when Arab Muslims in Palestine are being dehumanized and obliterated at this very moment, and while Libya was one of the latest Arab nations to be targeted for its oil resources, only a decade ago, with European oil companies moving in directly after the downfall of Ghadafi (which makes the timing extremely suspicious, one might say):

And even after the US finished their occupation of Iraq, Western oil companies remained en mass to continued drilling:

Egypt to this day remains economically destabilized while Western nations exploit its oil stocks, to no benefit at all of its peoples:

I'm sure I could cite dozens of other cases, but it's clear that there is a one-on-one parallel between spice melange and oil, making any protests of apoliticism in an inherently political story utterly vain.

I could go on, but I needn't. In short, this beautiful movie could have done so much good even beyond its obvious artistic merits, but instead it is still towing the political line. Much as was the case for Jessica and Paul, sometimes you can be a Harkonnen and not know it.

#dune #dune part 2 #meta #islam #arabic #history #orientalism #paul atreides #lady jessica #chani kynes #oil drilling #colonialism #arrakis #north africa #the middle east

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sa7abnews · 5 months ago

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Gladiator II: A missed chance for North African representation

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/11/gladiator-ii-a-missed-chance-for-north-african-representation/

Gladiator II: A missed chance for North African representation

It’s been 24 years since Maximus Decimus Meridius had his vengeance in Ridley Scott’s historical epic Gladiator.

Today it is still a world-beloved piece of cinema in which screenwriters David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson wove real-life figures of Ancient Rome into their fictionalised account of a general-turned-slave-turned-gladiator, iconically played by Russell Crowe.

This November, a sequel is headed to cinemas, set potentially 15-20 years after Maximus brushed his way through a wheatfield to the afterlife.

Irish actor Paul Mescal takes over as the lead, playing a grown-up Lucius Verus who first appeared as the child heir to the Roman Empire in the original film set during AD 180.

To begin Gladiator II, David Scarpa, Peter Craig and Franzoni’s script has him packed off as a child to Numidia – which today would roughly cover the area of modern western Tunisia and eastern Algeria) in North Africa – by his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen reprising the role) to grow up away from the scheming Roman senate.

Lucius has a wife and child but has had no contact with his mother for 15 years. There’s also the small problem of Rome, ruled by co-emperors Caracalla (Joseph Quinn) and Geta (Fred Hechinger) wanting to expand their empire further into North Africa.

Fictional Roman General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) invades the coastal village where Lucius lives and he is subsequently enslaved as a, you guessed it, gladiator.

Denzel Washington is thrown into the mix as Macrinus, described by Scott as “a power broker and arms dealer” who enlists Lucius in his plot to usurp the rule of Rome.

As a critic of mixed British and Tunisian heritage, with a Tanit tattoo on my right forearm, I have more than a passing interest in the representation of North Africa on screen, especially in films set during classical antiquity.

The Carthaginian Empire is “my Roman Empire” but I’m fully aware of Hollywood’s annoying habit of white-washing, erasing and/or misrepresenting the Maghreb’s history and inhabitants.

Ridley Scott’s filmography is far too guilty of that – Gladiator included.

Not only did the 2000 film manage to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Arabs but it also belies their historical movements.

The story introduces grotesque Arabic-speaking slavers who capture an injured and bereaved Maximus at his home in Spain.

Fun fact: there is no evidence that Arab slavers operated in Spain, as confirmed by the Gladiator’s historical consultant Professor Kathleen Coleman who was “unpleasantly surprised” when she saw the final film.

“I was under the impression that although the plot was fictitious [Dreamworks] wanted the atmosphere to be authentic,” she said. “But that is evidently not the case.”

The ugly-looking, Tuarag-wearing slavers take Maximus in a camel caravan to the Roman province of Zucchabar (Miliana in modern-day Algeria) which is presented as a dirty, sweaty, fly-invested burg.

The scene was shot at Ksar of Ait-Ben-Haddou located in an inland village in Morocco. It looks a lot different from the green, mountainous landscape of the region once inhabited by Romanised Amazighs (Berber).

Of course, Hollywood has to portray North Africa as a barren, desert wasteland.

British-Iranian Omid Djalili once again plays a slimy, unscrupulous Arab (remember him in The Mummy?) trying to get a “special price” for his slaves.

He also says he picked up Djimon Hounsou’s Numidian Juba from a “salt mine in Carthage.”

Juba was a well-known Numidian name — King Juba II was a client king of Numidia and married Cleopatra Selene, the only daughter of Queen Cleopatra VII and Mark Antony.

But given the brazen historical inaccuracies in the film, I wouldn’t be surprised if this line is a mistaken reference to the false myth of the Romans sowing the city of Carthage (Ancient Tunisia) with salt after winning the third Punic War – not the salt mines of Carthago Nova (New Carthage) in southern Spain.

A place where we’ve already established Arab slavers did not operate. A look at the first trailer for Gladiator II, the cast and interviews prove it has already prevented Middle Eastern, North African and Arab actors from playing real-life characters with shared ethnicities.

Let’s start with the brother emperors Geta and Caracalla. They are the sons of Septimius Severus and his second wife Julia Domna who briefly shared power after their father died in AD 211.

Severus was born in Leptis Magna, a trading city on the coast of Ancient Libya founded by Phoenician merchants from Tyre/Syria centuries earlier.

It was a prominent municipality in the Carthaginian Empire and when Severus became emperor, he turned it into a thriving metropolis. He had maternal Italian and paternal Punic ancestry and after a few civil wars, was proclaimed emperor of Rome in AD 193.

He was the first North African Emperor and that heritage was so much a part of his identity that the historian Cassius Dio described him as “Libyan by race.”

Severus was introduced to Julia Domna, a Syrian woman whose father was descended from the Arab Emesene dynasty.

Her surname is an Ancient Arabic word for “black” and she became Empress. Geta and Caracalla, therefore, would be of mixed ethnicity, mostly Arab-Middle Eastern and North African, but the actors playing them are not.

After her husband’s death, Julia Domna became a mediator between her sons but there’s no listing of the character on the film’s IMDb page nor sign of her in the trailer.

Instead, we have the return of Lucilla who was, in reality, executed in AD 182 for her involvement in the failed attempt to assassinate her brother Commodus.

She appears to be filling Julia Domna’s shoes which suggests another MENA character has been sidelined in favour of a white counterpart with history being altered to allow for it.

The trailer suggests Lucius spends time as a child in Egypt prior to Lucilla sending him to Numidia, thanks to pyramids and palm trees in the background of one scene showing him running away from approaching Romans.

Interestingly, Lucilla had two sons called Lucius: one with her first husband Lucius Verus, who died young, and another with her second husband Tiberius, a Roman general, who was murdered by Caracalla.

The film’s iteration appears to be a mash-up of them both.

We see a battle on Numidian soil after an attack on what appears to be a coastal fortress, launched by Acacius from the sea. If this is taking place around AD 211, then the Amazigh-nation was already a part of the Roman Province as a client state set up by Septimius Severus.

Why Rome is attacking is unclear unless they are playing with historical timelines again and showing Severus’ annexation of various North African settlements – including Castellum Dimmidi, Thabudeos, Gemellae, Vescera and Thubunae – to expand Numidia. But none of these colonies were coastal.

We see a female archer in armour aiming a bow and arrow which may be a nod to several North African legends of female warriors.

Asbyte was a Libyan princess and ally of Hannibal Barca during the Second Punic War, according to Silius Italicus’s poem Punica; there were the legendary Scythian warrior women who hailed from Ancient Iran and the famous Amazons who were believed to have once resided in Libya.

She appears to be played by the Israeli actress Yuval Gonen who is listed as the character Arishat (a Phoenician/Punic name) and later seen dead in the arms of Lucius with an arrow through her chest.

If this is his Numidian, Libyan or Carthaginian wife (we see him kissing a woman who looks just like the female warrior towards the end of the trailer) then as with Djimon Hounsou’s Juba in the first film, actors with Algerian, Libyan and Tunisian, even Lebanese or Syrian heritage, have been overlooked.

The same goes for Washington’s Macrinus. Seemingly based on the real-life figure Marcus Opellius Macrinus, he was a Praetorian prefect in charge of Rome’s civil affairs, but of Berber origin and born in Caesarea of Ancient Mauretania (modern Cherchell, Algeria).

Fearing for his life after it was prophesied that he and his son would reign over Rome, he enlisted a Roman soldier to be his “tool” in the assassination of Caracalla, and the film seems to follow suit.

Washington’s casting is certainly a better choice than seeing yet another white actor cast as a Roman politician; Derek Jacobi is back as Gracchus with Matt Lucas and Tim McInnerny joining as figures in Rome’s elite.

Like Macrinus, the actor has African heritage but Africa is a continent, not a country and too often Hollywood fails to represent the diversity of that fact.

Instead, they opt for racial binaries that limit Ancient figures to black and white. The only North African in the main cast list is that of Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy. Her casting was announced in May 2023 but she doesn’t appear in the trailer and no character information has been shared. So, did she make the cut?

Gladiator II looks set to be yet another blockbuster epic choosing to botch historical facts and project anachronistic ideas about race onto classical antiquity.

The Roman Empire and Roman North Africa was a place and period defined by its ethnic diversity and a throughline of those ethnicities can be traced to the people living across Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Lebanon today and in the diaspora.

Unfortunately, people with that ancestry have once again been denied the opportunity to play a role in the commitment of their iconic heritage to cinematic history.

It’s the Hollywood story of our lives and I’m tired of it.

Hanna Flint is a film and TV critic, writer and author of Strong Female Character with bylines at Empire, Time Out, Elle, Town & Country, the Guardian, BBC Culture and IGN

Follow her here: @HannaFlint

#Culture

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phantomladyoverparis · 1 year ago

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La mort trouble (1970), dir. Férid Boughedir & Claude d’Anna

#La mort trouble #unquiet death #Férid Boughedir #Claude d’Anna #70s #french cinema #Tunisian cinema

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gregor-samsung · 2 years ago

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الرجل الذي باع ظهره [The Man Who Sold His Skin] (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2020)

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rapha-reads · 2 years ago

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One of my brother's best friend is a Tunisian lesbian, I met her ten years ago and she adored me, asked about me all the, and yesterday and today I got to meet her again and hang out with her and really talk with her, and she's just. Super fun. She's a cinema expert and fan, she's a photographer, she works in archeology, she's a metalhead, she's passionate about TV shows and she's from a city in Tunisia that I've always wanted to visit, and we get to talk Arabic languages, music and cultures together, something that she told me she can't do normally because she doesn't know a lot of Maghrebian people and... Yeah, she's very cool. Very, very cool.

#rapha rambles #this post doesn't really have a point i just wanted to sing w's praise because she's hella cool and i needed to say it somewhere #it's also because i miss hanging out with maghrebians - my latino friends are great and latin america has a lot in common with north africa #but it's not the same and i'm really glad i got to speak arabic for a couple of days and talk north africa music and archeology and cinema

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sloshed-cinema · 1 year ago

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Ashkal (2022)

Does every criminal have a motive? A series of apparent self-immolations clustered around a derelict neighborhood in Tunis makes even more fraught a tinderbox of issues in a country trying to heal after its people worked to overthrow an autocratic regime. Are these deaths merely suicides? Or are they connected, the work of a terrorist bent on sowing chaos or an ideologue with an anti-police mentality? If the gears of justice move slowly, the mechanisms of police corruption are well oiled. Fatma’s quest for the truth is met with scorn and obstruction from her colleagues, and the police union is quick to use the situation and fear over anti-police mentalities to appeal for shuttering the investigation into their crimes and complicity in authoritarianism. Even aside from the human toll of these crimes, the situation makes for a difficult minefield which Fatma and her partner (much more reluctantly) must navigate. It certainly doesn’t help that our adversary is only ever glimpsed at a distance or framed anonymously. The only image of his face, strange and deformed with small eyes and an almost absent nose, is the product of Fatma’s description. When the camera captures him, he’s swathed in bandages or a hoody, only his scarred and burned hands visible. We are trapped in Fatma’s perception during her dogged pursuit, limited by it. To that end, the final confrontation between the two is more emotional than physical. There’s nothing Fatma can do but gaze at her quarry in the inferno and weep in frustration. There is no release when various factions keep stoking the flames, and this mysterious figure is the avatar of that disarray.

The Gardens of Carthage itself reflects the decay of this situation. Construction which was initiated during the regime promptly ended with only very slow progress made in the ensuing years. The result is a strange, apocalyptic landscape of blank floors and open windows, walls opening up to nothing but empty air. People aren’t sure how to move forward, leaving behind ruin and disrepair. The camera at points lingers on austere compositions of steel and concrete accompanied by orchestral cluster chords. It manages to find a sort of elegance in the ugliness, even if it is marred by the proceedings of the film itself. Though the implications are terrible, the film manages to find a sort of strange beauty too in the orange glow of flames slowly overtaking a car in the distance or a man in a high-rise window. The closing moments show a score of people giving into the seduction of the fire, and yet Fatma alone seems able to resist that siren song, not participating in the collective madness.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'immolation' or 'Commission'.

A construction crane appears in a scene.

Ashes are found.

Someone watches an Internet video.

BIG DRINK

Someone stands or sits at the edge of an unfinished building.

The shot looks straight down from above.

#drinking games #ashkal #the tunisian investigation #youssef chebbi #fatma oussaifi #crime #horror #horror & thriller #tunisian cinema

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revev2 · 2 months ago

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Remembering Yasser Jradi: A Tunisian Artist, Activist, and Revolutionary

Today, we gather to mourn the loss and celebrate the life of Yasser Jradi, a true Renaissance man of Tunisia. As an artist, activist, and revolutionary, Yasser touched countless lives and left an indelible mark on Tunisia’s cultural and political landscape. Yasser was not just an artist; he was art personified. A master of calligraphy, ceramics, photography, cinema, and music, he poured his soul…

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theprofessorofdesire · 3 months ago

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Haydée Chikly Tamzali was a Tunisian-Jewish actress, writer, and filmmaker who played an essential role in the development of Arabic and African cinema.

Chikly began working with her father as a young girl. When she was 16, he directed her in her first starring role in the short film Zohra (1922), which was written by Chikly herself and is considered the first fiction film made in Tunisia. She served as her father's muse and was able to participate in various aspects of filmmaking, including film editing and hand-coloring.

📷 Tunisian actress, writer, and filmmaker Haydée Samama Chikly Tamzali, 1922.

#Haydée Chikly Tamzali

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warningsine · 7 months ago

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MARRAKECH — Nabil Ayouch is Morocco’s best-known filmmaker, having directed international hits such as “Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets” (2000), “Whatever Lola Wants” (2007), “Horses of God” (2012).

Over recent years he has played a key role in developing the nascent Moroccan film industry including the production of a slate of over 40 Moroccan telefilms, for public broadcaster SNRT, which launched a new generation of directing and acting talent.

His 2012 pic, “Horses of God,” about the 2003 Casablanca suicide bombers, was sold to 40 countries by Wild Bunch and officially presented in the U.S. by Jonathan Demme, where it was Morocco’s candidate for the foreign-language Academy Award.

However, in 2015 Ayouch became a bête noire for certain quarters of Moroccan society due to his prostitution drama, “Much Loved,” which was banned one week after the film bowed in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, on account of “serious outrage to the moral values of Moroccan women.” Private court proceedings were also filed against Ayouch.

Ayouch and his main actresses were fervently attacked in the media; the lead actress was assaulted in the street, leading her to move to Paris. Critics of “Much Loved” dubbed him as a foreigner who is undermining national cultural values. Ayouch was born in Paris to a French Jewish mother, of Tunisian descent, and a Moroccan Muslim father, born in Fez, and he has lived in Morocco since the early 1990s.

He is currently completing shooting on his next project “Razzia” which was initially conceived as a sci-fi project about the gulf between the rich and poor.

Ayouch received a $500,000 grant from the Moroccan Cinema Center (CCM) for this original version, penned by “Horses”’ scribe Jamal Belmahi, but as a result of the experience from “Much Loved” he decided to radically alter it and focus primarily on the human drama of the main characters.

He therefore turned down the initial grant and re-applied for CCM funding but was unsuccessful, which forced him to finance the film entirely as an international co-production.

The new script is written by Nabil Ayouch and Maryam Touzani and stars Maryam Touzani, Belgium’s Ariel Worthalter, Abdelilah Rachid, Dounia Binebine and Amine Ennaji.

It is produced by Bruno Nahon Paris-based Unité de Production, and is co-produced by iAyouch’s Casablanca-based production house, Ali’N Productions, Les Films du Nouveau Monde, France 3 Cinéma, and Belgium’s Artemis Productions.

It has also received funding from Eurimages, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation’s Film Centre, Belgian tax rebates and SofitvCiné 4, and has been pre-sold to Canal Plus, OCS, RTBF, BeTV and Voo.

Lensed in Casablanca, Ouarzazate and the Atlas mountains, “Razzia” depicts five separate stories, one set in the 1980s in the Atlas mountains and the others in present day Casablanca.

One of the recurring themes in the film is a reference to the 1942 classic “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, which is ironically one of Morocco’s best-known symbols, even though it was shot entirely in Hollwood during WWII.

“In both films, people are fighting against an ideology,” says Ayouch. “They’re fighting against the Nazis in ‘Casablanca’ and in my film they are also trying to resist. The analogy is very clear.”

One of the key themes that links together the five stories is intolerance, ignorance of others and the refusal to accept differences, which Ayouch views as a growing sentiment in Morocco.

“The film is about people in search of freedom, and the right to speak their minds, act freely, and talk about the issues that matter to them. In particular the right of women to achieve this – since I think it’s getting more and more difficult for women to be free in modern Morocco.”

The social issues contained in the earlier versions of the project are still very present, but it is less about the gulf between rich and poor and more about issues of freedom of speech, that affect all tiers of Moroccan society, and the tendency for one section of society to feel contempt for another and become increasingly less tolerant.

“These are dangerous times throughout the world,” says Ayouch. “We have seen this with the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. and the rise of the far right in Hungary, Austria and France. Demagogy is leading in a new way, and there’s a new form of cultural hegemony – we’re seeing similar trends in the Arab world.”

Ayouch conceives the film, in part, as a tribute to the city of “Casablanca,” and explores the links with the no man’s land depicted in Michael Curtiz’s 1942 classic pic.

“My film will be a tribute but also a way of taking back what is ours,” says the director. “Casablanca was shot completely in L.A. and shows nothing of the true city, but even some locals in Casablanca are convinced that their streets hosted the original production.”

The pic includes images from the 1942 film and its soundtrack includes the iconic song, “As Times Go By.” One of the characters is convinced that the Bogart tearjerker was shot in his neighborhood when he was a young man. Alongside the references to “Casablanca,” other cult references that feature in the film include the pop group “Queen” and the late Freddy Mercury who personified the spirit of freedom that Ayouch wants to explore in the film. The soundtrack includes “We are the Champions,” “The Show Must Go On,” and “I Want to Break Free.”

The zones of modern-day Casablanca depicted in the film include the old medina and poor neighborhoods, where two of the characters live, walled condominiums in the “rich ghettoes” and also Casablanca’s famous art deco buildings. Ayouch considers that the city’s art deco architecture is part of the appeal of the 1942 pic and he wanted to bring the real Casablanca into homes around the world.

“Like millions of people, I really love this movie. A few years ago, I met a producer in New York who asked me how come this city was so famous around the world and yet no scene was shot in Morocco. He asked me whether it made me nervous. At the time I said “no.” But over time I realized that it did bother me. Even Moroccan people believe that it was shot here.”

Ayouch suddenly realized that this paradoxical situation was an excellent metaphor for what he views as the split personality of modern Moroccans and decided to create a character who believed that it was shot there. Another key character is a woman in quest for freedom. Society doesn’t let her life the way she wants to, so she moves and starts a new life, far from her husband. Another character, Hakim, is a carpenter living in a poor area, who is looked down upon by his father, dreams of becoming a musician and worships Freddy Mercury.

The present-day characters are all linked to a teacher who worked in a little school in an isolated Berber village, in the Atlas mountains, in 1982.

Ayouch says he was a man full of dreams who wanted to transmit his vision to children, to make them better people, and is able to do so until the authorities stop him, by means of the educational reforms introduced in 1982.

“I believe that there was a crucial change in mindsets in the early 1980s which changed education systems throughout the world and has had a major impact on the world of today,” said Ayouch. He added: “The education system turned its back on the humanities. This happened throughout the Maghreb region. In Morocco disciplines such as sociology and philosophy were taken off the curriculum. We’re now reaping the consequences. We’re building a new kind of human being.”

Ayouch considers that the defeat of the teacher in his film symbolizes the defeat of the entire society and he tries to trace a spiritual link to the other characters. He admits that this focus on the inner world of the characters and the way that society can crush people’s dreams was deeply affected by his experience with “Much Loved.”

“What happened to me after ‘Much Loved’ and to the actresses was a very strong experience. It really left a great impact. I will never forget the words I heard. Things I never thought I would hear. Such bad things. I never thought that this kind of split personality was so strong. That people could confuse fiction with reality and attack a director because he makes a film.”

Ayouch believes that there is a long-term evolution of mindsets which is engendering mistrust, intolerance and hatred.

He said that he admires how directors such as the Coen brothers or David Cronenberg show how oppressive forces can develop very slowly and then suddenly explode into violence.

He hopes to be able to complete “Razzia” in time for Cannes 2017 and thinks that it will be an important opportunity to focus on how mentalities are changing not only in Morocco but throughout the world.

“Mentalities are regressing for a simple reason,” he says. “Freedom of speech. We are moving backwards. What we have seen over the past two-to-three years, not only in Morocco but throughout the world, is a big step backwards.”

“Moroccan cinema has recorded major developments over the last decade, but they will all be worthless unless we defend freedom of speech. Funding for films in Morocco is now more about censorship than the films themselves. We can become one of the strongest film industries in the region, but we can also become very weak. I meet a lot of young directors who are all saying the same.”

Ayouch would also like to see greater solidarity between directors because he says that many complain but remain silent and cites the fact that for “Much Loved” over 80 major directors signed a petition in his support but few Moroccan directors defended him publicly.

Nonetheless, he maintains his own fighting spirit: “The day I feel I will be affected and refrain from speaking about what haunts and inspires me, I will stop. I will quit. I will make my films somewhere else.”

“Razzia” will be completed in early 2017. Ad Vitam will distribute the film in France and Films Distribution will handle international sales.

#razzia #casablanca #Nabil Ayouch #cinema

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