Public images on the sidelines of the 22nd Khouribga International African Film Festival – Maroc-Actu

The 22nd edition of the Khouribga International African Film Festival this year was distinguished by the presentation of a number of distinguished cinematographic strips, including feature films and documentaries, alongside the organization of workshops in the field movies and special seminars to discuss these bands. It is universal, and the social, political and humanitarian issues it raises are specific to the African continent with its positive and negative aspects. I therefore stopped at four experiences that seem to me worthy of attention, because of the themes that surrounded them with their implicit questions about the content of the work, as well as the mechanisms that the directors implemented to achieve the show and enjoyment.

Olive Black

In the first place, it was the film (Oliver Black) of the young Moroccan director, screenwriter and producer Tawfik Baba, a fictional story inspired by the reality of the plight of African immigrants, and it is about a young black African man lost in the desert looking for a way out to realize his hopes, ambitions and dreams, to meet by chance a white person who must also achieve through his journey a certain personal goal.
At this point, I don’t want to talk narratively about the reasons for this trip, because I’m looking at a cinematographic work that differs from the novel, which often invites the reader to listen to the narrator so as not to lose the threads. connecting the characters, who can sometimes be spiders in a narrative form in which meaning is lost. The central point of the novel is in its ramifications, so I will try to delve into the universes of this tape from a technical and artistic point of view, far from literary analysis, so that the reading is objective, calling the viewer to seek beauty as a way and path to reach the problem in question, and not the other way around.
The band (Oliver Black) is one of the few bands that has embraced simplicity in the easy and abstinent format. Its owner tried with ingenuity and creative sense, to make the camera a plastic brush for the restoration of space, with a twinkling eye that knew how to seize the opportune moment to photograph scenes and paintings of virgin scenes. , who were present. Nature, through its creative ability to meditate and look to produce what can be photographed at the right time, despite the silence that reigned a significant part of the sequence of these scenes, in return it was revealing, in the absence of words, based on an unwritten mental script, on emotional and human cases, which developed as a result of the journey and the accompanying strong and influential relationship between the two people. If this expressive type sends us back to the literature of travel, it places us in turn before an artistic genre that can fit into the framework (of travel cinema), because it contains elements that flow and intersect in the element of suspense and patience, eager to suffer to discover the unknown, as in the Ulysses tape, in which Kirk Douglas played the lead role.
The significance of the tape (Oliver Black), directed by Tawfiq Baba, lies in the element of absolute silence and stillness, given his knowledge of listening to nature, which even applies to his personality in his relationships with his friends and colleagues, which earned him the work his bet and bet on the importance of listening in the present time, in addition to his asceticism in the use of cinematic elements and accessories that furnish the scenes from the start to the end of the strip in a minimal way and with simple functional tools when the tent turns into a trailer rack.
We can therefore conclude from all this that the cinema does not only need material capacities and this is a creative condition in some cases, but rather ideas with their cultural and creative charge, as is the case in the band (Oliver Black).

apple fall

The second tape that caught my attention at this festival is called: (Autumn of Apples), because it came with a simple idea and theme, which Moroccan director Mohamed Moftaker reduced to the story of a boy from ten-year-old named Suleiman who did not know the reasons for his mother’s disappearance after birth, only to find himself in conflict with his father, who denied it claiming he was the son of a sin caused by the teacher at the school far from the roundabout in which he resides.
The importance of this strip lies in the aesthetics and precision of the panoramic scenes, with great professionalism at the technical level, but it is subject to the logic of the images of postal messages that sometimes become a still life with the logic of the absence of characters, as if we were in front of a work of a visual artist, because nature without the presence of man in the plastic custom, becomes Nature morte, on the one hand, on the other hand, this band overlaps its forerunner in the element of silence that created the element of suspense to understand its content and content, which gave it a spiritual dimension that relied on meditation and diving into the depths of the self with cinematic tools suggestive requiring semiotic analysis, subject to anatomy The visible movements of the eyes, faces, and movements of the representatives in a closed rectangular space whose axis or center point is the po mmier in the house as an existential indication that can be mistaken about the tree of life that was the cause of the exit of Adam and Eve from Paradise, if we treat the subject of this tree from the theological side , while its meaning is found in many other artistic expressions, especially in a plastic work by the artist (Mondron), called “The Four Seasons”, which is a drawing of a tree at different times of the year, an expression of its resistance and its determination to continue. Rhea.
What distinguishes this tree as a clue in the “Autumn of the Apples” strip is this existential impulse linked to time, which tightens the threads of the family ties of the family, so much has it remained unshakeable in the face of all the transformations, that they are natural or human. , which will make the tape in its second part a transformative station in terms of the events of those The Simple Story that director Mohamed Moftaker used as an excuse to pose existential questions worthy of study and examination. generations, their advantages and disadvantages.
The final point that caught my attention (and this is a personal opinion) was that the movements of the actors inside the enclosed space of the house was a movement that tended to be theatrical rather than cinematic, so that this tape remains an attempt worthy of attention, and a work that adds to the Moroccan cinematographic treasure.

It happened at 2 Talaat Harb Street

While the third tape, which left a clear imprint on the minds of Khouribga Festival audiences, is an experimental Egyptian film similar to a documentary tape tagged “Happened in 2 Talaat Harb Street”, by its Egyptian director Magdy Ahmed Ali , who made his experience a window into four different paintings in their time, through An Apartment on the Edge of Tahrir Square, which is a semi-documentary tape of the historical, political and social events that Egypt has known since President Gamal Abdel Nasser mounted the government’s position to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak. As for the last scene, it was in color and was more intense in terms of the work on the sentimental element, the sense of responsibility and patriotism, to arrive at a conclusion perhaps more romantic in its presentation on the need to s cling to the ground and the homeland instead of retreating and thinking about defeatist solutions that call for leaving it.
What distinguishes this cinematic work is the high technology that has been used to make it at all levels, and the presence of illustrious names in the Egyptian cinematographic scene.

white thread

As for the fourth and last cassette, qualitative and distinguished, it is called “The White Thread” by the producer and director (Desiree Kahi Kubo) of Namibia, and it speaks of an impossible love story between blacks and whites under the apartheid regime. He occupies an African policeman of New Zealand origin and she works as a servant. A romantic relationship will arise between them that will end in separation, and the fruit will be a boy who will be the reason for their meeting again. The entire tape is a simple construction from a technical point of view, but contains impressive scenes through which the director was able to employ all the possibilities available, especially the actors, to diagnose it, and this was one of the elements that contained the tape and preserved some of its drawbacks.

Shafeeq Zakari visual artist and critic