Florence Martin, Farida Benlyazid and Moroccan Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Florence Martin (FM): This book is my attempt to correct a grave injustice by zooming in on a free, spiritual, inventive Moroccan woman filmmaker. While little known outside Morocco, there she is a cultural icon and a revered dame du cinéma.
Farida Benlyazid is a pioneer woman filmmaker, the first woman producer, and the first woman to film a kiss (in her first feature film, A Door to the sky, 1988) in Morocco. She is a woman who decided early on that movies would be her life, that she would earn her living as a filmmaker in a developing country. She is a pious Muslim who prays five times a day and who has been married four times, who does not believe in orthodoxy or religious diktats, and whose spirituality is generous and radiant. Fluent in Darija, Spanish, and French, Farida has penned articles in Spanish and in French. She has written scripts, short stories, and even a play in French. She is a mother of three, a feminist, and a politically engaged citizen in her country and beyond. Her film career is shaped in large parts by her liberal, anti-globalization, and above all feminist politics, which have become indissociable from her spirituality, after her return to Morocco from a decade spent in France.
Writing about Farida Benlyazid thus meant narrating her dynamic, multifaceted journey through the independence of Morocco, globalization, the history of the turn of the millennium. I welcomed the challenge!
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
FM: The book, on the one hand, looks at the development of independent Morocco’s film production, especially the challenges posed to women filmmakers there in the 1980s and 1990s. It looks at the itinerary of a trail-blazing woman director and feminist Islam in the Maghreb. On the other hand, it includes close readings of her films and of her scripts in the context of the history of postcolonial Morocco and of globalization, as well as in relation to the shift from national to transnational cinema in Morocco. This monograph follows the unique itinerary of a particular filmmaker and looks at the various challenges posed by where and when she makes her films, as well as the miraculous solutions she has created to ensure the success of her filmmaking.
J: What is the structure of your book?
FM: Farida describes herself as “international” in the way that Tangier used to be, during the international mandate (1912-1956)—at the time, its 15,000 inhabitants were of fifty-seven different nationalities. As a result, there was a wealth of varied cultures, languages, beliefs, and—perhaps most importantly for our protagonist—a co-existence of various ethnicities and cultures that respected one another.
The book starts in Tangier, where Farida was born, then follows her as a student to Paris, and then covers her return to Tangier, and her subsequent directing of her first film, A Door to the Sky, in Fez. Her filmmaking career takes her to Mali (for her documentary Aminata Traoré, A Woman of the Sahel, 1993) where she feels at home with the people she encountered, having been raised in constant contact with foreigners and different Tangerine people. When she films Casablanca, Casablanca (2002), and again her documentary Casanayda (2007) in the white city, for instance, she also takes Tangier with her in the way she relates to a variety of people from different backgrounds, ages, cultures, and, in the case of her documentary, from different aesthetics. Hence her docufiction in the Sahara (Frontieras, 2013) and her current involvement with a series of documentaries on Amazigh culture, dance, music, architecture. In between each production, she returns to Tangier, her home.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
FM: The book is a continuation of my work on Maghrebi women’s cinemas (previously addressed in Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women’s Cinema, Indiana Press University, 2011) and on Moroccan cinema (on which I worked with co-authors Will Higbee and Jamal Bahmad, in Moroccan Cinema Uncut: Decentred Voices, Transnational Perspectives, Edinburgh University Press, 2020). However, this time, I focused on one particular director. My wish was to explore the intertwining of her oeuvre, her biography, and her spiritual journey, and tease out the details of the latter in her films.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
FM: The most obvious readers are students and researchers in world cinema, film studies, North African studies, feminism, and Islam. This said, the book is written in accessible language, follows a chronological structure, and is in a style that is meant to attract a large readership interested in the work and the portrait of the freest woman I have ever had the honor of meeting and getting to know. I hope that this portrait of a warm, open-minded, feminist, free Muslim woman can help put to rest some of the unfortunate reductive images and caricatures of women in Islam that have circulated in the West.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
FM: My co-editor, Will Higbee, and I are currently revising the very last proofs of the forthcoming volume, Transnational Moroccan Cinema: Critical Dialogues (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). My next project will be to look at the formidable contributions of Arab women filmmakers to global cinema in the numerous ways they have addressed political subjects in documentaries and fiction films while also offering innovative ways of filming. I am expanding my corpus to include films by women directors from the entire Arab world. My aim is to analyze how their filmic intervention in politics, from local to regional to global, offers new models of feminist intervention on screen.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5, The Sahara, the Atlas, and Tangier, pages 147 to 151)
The Bag (2011)
In 2010, Transparency International, the non-governmental organization that measures the perceived level of corruption in 180 countries around the world, published its 2009 report card: Morocco was ranked 89th, with a score of 3.4 out of 10 (10 being the highest score in the honesty test, which no country ever reaches!). It is clear that Morocco has been doing poorly from year to year on this NGO's Corruption Perception Index (CPI). Yet, this is not for lack of legislation: articles 248 to 250 of the Moroccan Penal Code attach severe penalties to any act of corruption in the public and private sectors, in particular for influence peddling. By the turn of the millennium, whistleblowers on corruption, notably among the FAR (Royal Armed Forces), had already alerted the authorities to its pandemic. By 2007, other images of corruption had reached the Moroccan public: those of the 'Targuist Sniper', who posted his first video online on July 8, 2007. The digital film shows the gendarmes in the region of Targuist (known for its cannabis) grabbing the bills handed out by the drivers whose vehicles the police are supposed to control and letting them pass through the various roadblocks…
Transparency Maroc approached Farida to make a (very) short film to raise awareness about corruption (4 minutes 57!) which will be released in 2011. Having resolved not to produce any more, she calls on Latif Lahlou to be her producer. She invites a fine group of Moroccan actors (including Mohamed Bastaoui, Mohamed Khuyi, Zoubida Akif, Mohamed Choubi, Mohamed Rzine, Mohamed Marouazi) to participate in the project.
Farida (unlike the ‘Targuist Sniper’) won’t touch the army or the police to show the endemic dimension of corruption in her film. She follows the path of money passing from one hand to the other, the sum growing exponentially with each transaction, culminating in the purchase of an imported designer bag, motivated by a frivolous and expensive rivalry. Her camera focuses on the banknote(s) in close-ups and close-ups: the filmmaker puts on display the repeated gesture of corruption -- so discreet usually-- smack in the center of the screen. Money increases as corruption climbs up the ladder of society. Thus, the twenty dirhams of the initial corruption gradually grow into a briefcase filled with cash once it reaches the heights of financial and political power.
The camera first focuses on the hands of a woman in a dispensary who uses 20 MAD to bribe the employee who blocks the access of patients to a doctor; then on the latter’s hand passing 50 MAD to a bureaucrat for an official permit; the civil-servant’s hand then doles out 200 MAD to a teacher to ensure his offspring to pass his exam, and so on and so forth. Society operates like a clockwork mechanism, well-oiled by the passing of money and by the assumption that every service is up for sale. The civil servants who appear on the screen are all corruptible: from the dispensary porter to the teacher, to the lawyer, to the politician. The ironically sober last scene closes on the Parisian designer bag bought by the wife of a powerful man for a staggering amount of money ending up in a garbage can through which a starving man is eagerly rummaging. This last character finds the bag of the title and throws it on the road, preferring an apple he rescues out of the trash and happily devours. The bag, once a shiny orange luxury product, is now a dirty piece of rubbish, angrily rejected by the hobo who lives on the fringes of a depraved society to which he never has access. Far from the fulfillment of the dreams bought by each protagonist, this final twist takes the form of an abrupt return to the brutal reality of the gulf that separates the haves from the have-nots. This symbolic denouement also denounces the commercial temptations of a consumer society unbridled by snobbery and globalization, to the sound of a nocturnal feline's heartbreaking meows.
A discreet extra-diegetic music, with a constant, dynamic beat (composed by MOBYDICK, in capital letters in the credits) accompanies each vignette. The final credits continue the framework of the score on which a rap by the singer-composer is spread out at a tenfold volume. Here again we recognize Farida's practice of calling on members of her film family, which grows from film to film: she had met Mobydick - who sang that he was not against the system, but that the system was against him - during the shoot of the documentary Casanayda! Other people loudly echo Mobydick’s belief on the streets of the Arab world at that time.
The Arab revolutions - 2010-2011 - and Farida
On December 17, 2010, a small film on social networks ignites the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, as well as major uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world. Yet, the fire had been smoldering for a long time before Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia...
The ensuing digital videos filmed and posted on the internet by those left behind by the Tunisian regime, who seize their phones or digital cameras as weapons of resistance, have an immediate impact. Like the Targuist Sniper’s resistance films denouncing corruption in Morocco, the film of the successful Tunisian revolution, relayed on all the screens, triggers movements ranging from turmoil to convulsion in the Arab world. The democratic use of the web to disseminate the words and images of those who had previously had no voice or access to cameras, signals both a radical gesture in repressed societies, and the sharing of a collective and transnational awakening of political and social awareness.
Wassyla Tamzali, an Algerian-European feminist, a lawyer who ardently defends women's rights for UNESCO (notably via the International Forum of Mediterranean Women), calls upon forty-one Arab intellectuals, authors and artists to write short texts, mostly fictions, about the revolutions in the Arab world. Each text can be read as a freeze frame to fix in writing "the fleeting moment of the present" of this Arab swell, as Behja Traversac indicates in her beautiful preface to the collection of Histoires minuscules des révolutions arabes / Tiny Stories of the Arab Revolutions. Farida writes “JUBILATION. Ce n’est que le début” / "JUBILATION. This is only the beginning" with glee. In her fiction, she imagines the meeting of Latifa, a Moroccan poetess who has come to read her poems and her French friend Michèle, who has invited her to a reading session in March 2011, in the North of France.
Her short story (finished on September 17, 2011), written in the moment, expresses Farida's political vision expressed through Latifa: "Mubarak is gone! He had seemed even more monstrous when we saw him defend Israel during the war in Gaza ... " Like Farida, Latifa and the demonstrators of the February 20 Movement in Morocco are against corruption: "Like them, she wanted the corruption that made her nauseous to stop"; like Farida, Latifa defends the young people in the street who "don't ask for power" and "say aloud what everyone else is thinking". The author also highlights the transnational dimension of the revolutions that spill over the borders of the Arab world: Latifa is offered French author Stéphane Hessel's essay Indignez-vous! Time for Outrage! and, once home, watches on television "the Indignados movement which claimed to be the Arab Spring in Spain. "It's Only the Beginning" shows the protest movements of 2011 as symptoms of a much larger human revolution. Latifa first expresses her astonishment at the political activism of the young, hitherto accused of passivity: "We thought they were caught up in the virtual world, and now they are bursting into the real world, ready to die so that the unbearable will stop". She follows the progress of the revolt on the screens of the media and social networks. The systematic occupation of the web and television by the young transforms these media into a transnational forum, a tool of unprecedented power. Here, Latifa-Farida attributes to the rebels a capacity for global imagination that is beyond her. And yet she already fears it might be illusory:
On Facebook, their freedom of speech made her jubilant. She envied their carefree attitude, and felt they were part of another world. Was it an illusion? They looked like mutants connected across the world by invisible streams. It was not a conflict of generations, it was more than that, they lived in another world, had an imagination that she found difficult to grasp at times (...) it was like two parallel societies living side by side, ignoring each other and in agreement.
Latifa already senses what will happen next when she describes her return home: "the tone had hardened... The young people were called extremist by the media... And they had become suspicious, they did not want to be taken over...". But this reality cannot break the surge of the revolutionary wave, Farida-Latifa continues with optimism. "Yes, this time, things were different, authentic globalization was on the move... it was only a beginning...". Her vision gives back to the term of 'globalization' cannibalized by a devouring late capitalism, its sense of openness to the circulation of ideas on a planetary scale. She predicts a possible new cycle in globalization different from the one initially triggered by the power of money. If "it is only a beginning", then what comes next is the end of the exploitation of the poor that is the mainstay of the current cycle. In a luminous flash, Farida delivers a hopeful image of what the web could become, under the skillful fingers of the young revolutionary Internet users.