Morocco

Synopsis:
In 1992, Nabil Ayouch directed Les Pierres bleues du désert, a first short film with Jamel Debbouze which tells the history of a convinced young man that there are large blue stones in the desert.Read More »

It is the holy month of Ramadan in Morocco in 1981. Amina, accompanied with her seven years old son Mehdi, come to live with her father-in-law Ahmed in a small village in Morocco, after her husband was arrested for political reasons. The arrest of the father must stay a secret for Mehdi who was told that his father traveled to France for work.Read More »

La falaise is the first short film by Faouzi Bensaïdi, a Moroccan director who has continued, after this first success already showing his special leg, with Trajet and Le mur , then feature films, including A Thousand Months , noticed at Cannes, and the last one. date, Volubilis . This film, in theaters at the moment, reveals, like La falaise , the director’s interest and concern for his country, for his pains and his peculiarities. In both works, there is an important social dimension and an exacerbated dramatic sense.Read More »

Quote:
Abla runs a modest local bakery from her home in Casablanca where she lives alone with her 8-year-old daughter, Warda. When Samia, a young pregnant woman knocks on their door, Abla is far from imagining that her life will change forever.Read More »

Quote:
In the Moroccan desert night dilutes forms and silence slides through sand. Dawn starts then to draw silhouettes of dunes while motionless figures punctuate landscape. From night´s abstraction, light returns its dimension to space and their volume to bodies. Stillness concentrates gaze and duration densify it. The adhan -muslim call to pray- sounds and immobility, that was condensing, begins to irradiate. And now the bodies are those which dissolves into the desert.Read More »

Quote:
It was in 1981 while I was editing a film, The King of Comedy. We worked at night so no one would call us on the telephone and I would have television on, and one channel in New York at the time, around 2 or 3 in the morning, was showing a film called Transes. It repeated all night and it repeated many nights. And it had commercials in it, but it didn’t matter. So I became passionate about this music that I heard and I saw also the way the film was made, the concert that was photographed and the effect of the music on the audience at the concert. I tracked down the music and eventually it became my inspiration for many of the designs and construction of my film The Last Temptation of Christ. […] And I think the group was singing damnation: their people, their beliefs, their sufferings and their prayers all came through their singing. And I think the film is beautifully made by Ahmed El Maanouni; it’s been an obsession of mine since 1981 and that is why we are inaugurating the Foundation with Trances. (Martin Scorsese, May 2007)Read More »

Mimosas (original title: Mimosas) is a 2016 drama film directed and co-written by Oliver Laxe, described by Laxe as ‘a Religious Western’. The film is a co-production between Spain, Morocco, France and Qatar. It was screened in the International Critics’ Week section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Nespresso Grand Prize.Read More »

Synopsis:
The story revolves around Hassan, who is studying Arabic calligraphy from a grand master. Coming across a fragment of manuscript, Hassan goes in search of the missing pieces, believing that once he finds them, he will learn the secrets of love. With the help of Zin, a lovers’ go-between, he meets the beautiful Aziz, Princess of Samarkand. After encountering wars, a battle between false prophets and an ancient curse, he learns that an entire lifetime would not suffice for him to learn the many dimensions of love.Read More »

Synopsis:
A teacher is assigned to a remote desert village that is obsessed with a mysterious buried treasure and whose children are cursed to wander the desert.Read More »