Moroccan director Faouzi Bensaïdi’s third feature is the story of three dissatisfied young friends and petty thieves, set in the port of Tetouan. Malik dreams of a better future with Dounia, a local prostitute. Soufiane finds hope in radical Islam, while Allal wants more than the day-to-day struggle that consumes him.
Death for Sale presents a visually hypnotic landscape of abandoned buildings populated by a fragile generation waiting to explode. The film won the CICAE Art Cinema Award at Berlinale 2012 and heralds a new dawn in Moroccan cinema.
Bensaïdi, best known for his breakthrough 2003 drama A Thousand Months, says while Death for Sale was made before the Arab Spring, the film “deals with the reality of a generation left to bang its head against a wall.” The director says that Morocco has partly insulated itself from the Arab Spring through a change in attitude at government level.
This is reflected in the arts. The state made a firm choice to invest in culture over the past decade, says Bensaïdi. “What we have now is a young and free cinema which isn’t afraid to say and film things as they are,” he adds.
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The results are there for everyone to see. “Moroccan cinema has experienced an important evolution in the past 10 years,” says Lamia Cheddi, a spokeswoman for the state-financed Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM).
The CCM oversees 50 film festivals in Morocco and has opened four film academies in the past decade, such as ESAV in Mar- rakech. There are more than 110 active Moroccan filmmakers, and in 2011 the country produced 23 features and 80 shorts.
Through CCM the state invested roughly $7.1m in production in 2011. An average feature can cost $650,000, of which CCM will often finance 70%, according to Cheddi. The CCM is already a hub for many West African filmmakers.
In 2011 it co-produced Burkinabe director S. Pierre Yameogo’s La Patrie and four other features from Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso.
Morocco is also becoming a popular location: directors such as Atiq Rahimi from Afghanistan and Germany’s Oliver Schmitz shot films there in 2011●
Last Updated on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 09:13
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