OUAGADOUGOU: Morocco, long loved by Hollywood as a background set for its movies, now has a booming film industry of its own, with three films lined up for top honors at Africa s biggest cinema festival, FESPACO.
While African filmmakers across the continent deplore the decline of once strong national movie industries, the word from Morocco is different. Cinema audiences may have shrunk, yet local movies are still getting made and getting noticed.
What s important in Morocco is that in terms of box office there is always a Moroccan film topping the bill, Moroccan director Mohamed Ahed Bensouda told AFP. This was a far different situation, he said, from that in Nigeria and South Africa, where local production was high but where it was mostly US films which drew the crowds.
In the last decade, local production in Morocco has boomed from only five feature films a year to 15, and some are gems.
At this year s Pan-African Film and Television Festival (FESPACO), a two-yearly event, three Moroccan films were chosen to line up for Africa s version of the Oscar – the Golden Stallion of Yennenga.
Of the 19 movies competing for the award, only South Africa also has three entries.
In the short film category, Morocco too has four potential award winners including Bensouda s Le Revenant (The Ghost) about the anniversary of Mozart s death.
There were three reasons for Morocco s homegrown film success, said director Hasan Benjelloum, a past winner of the FESPACO runner-up award, the Silver Stallion.
There is political will, secondly we have filmmakers who work hard and thirdly at the head of the film commission we now have people who are filmmakers, he told AFP.
One Moroccan film tipped for top honors is Whatever Lola Wants by Nabil Ayouch. With one FESPACO win already under his belt in 2001, Ayouch hopes his tale of a US postal worker who goes to Egypt with her boyfriend and becomes fascinated by belly dancing will woo the jury. It won a good reception at its first FESPACO showing.
Though the film was privately financed, Ayouch, along with other Moroccan filmmakers, said the revival of the country s film industry was largely thanks to funding from the national film board, the Centre Cinematographique Marocain (CCM). His three earlier films were all co-financed by the fund.
It s not a secret. Cinema is an art and an industry like any other and you need a lot of money to make a film. In Morocco we have the CCM which helps, he said.
Wadaan Oummahat (Goodbye Mothers), another Moroccan film in competition, received about 40 percent of its funding from the CCM. The epic movie traces the exodus of Moroccan Jews to Israel in the 1960s, weaving family tales with ties towards Muslims and Israel s bid to recruit new inhabitants for the land.
The third entry from Morocco is Samira fi dayala (Samira s Garden) by director Latif Lahlou, about a young woman frustrated by her sexless marriage to an older man, who ends up seducing his cousin. The film won best screenplay at the Montreal World Film Festival in 2007.
It is important for Morocco to export its films and to show its culture, said Ayouch. In this globalised world where everything is a melting pot, we need to talk about our identity or others will do it in our place.
But Morocco s movies face the hurdle of distribution abroad which is often difficult. It s not enough to produce films, you have to distribute them, said Bensouda.
