Moumen Smihi, Moroccan Chronicles / Chroniques Marocaines
Morocco 1999, 35mm, 70 min
In this film, set in the ancient city of Fez, a working class mother, abandoned by her husband who has emigrated to Europe, tells three tales to her just-circumcised ten-year-old son. In the first, in which Smihi re-stages the Marrakech market scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), a monkey trainer makes children dance for the tourists. In the second, two lovers meet on the ramparts of Orson Welles’s Essaouira, the locations for Othello (1952), talk about their own forbidden love. And in the third, set in Smihi’s home town of Tangier, an old sailor dreams of vanquishing a sea monster: the Gibraltar ferry that connects Europe to Africa. In his deconstructed stories of Morocco, Smihi presents generations of masculinities stolen away by the various demands of economic necessity, religion, tradition and colonisation.
Film programme notes by Peter Limbrick