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Director Khalid Douache is somewhat of an outlier in Moroccan cinema. His 2015 short film, Le proje-T, follows an evening, night, and morning in the life of Reda Benmoumen, a Moroccan ‘nobody’ who spends most of his time watching satellite television and smoking cannabis. The film’s opening sequence is blurred and shot from a slightly…
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In 1996, more than 1,200 inmates at Abu Salim Prison were rounded up in its courtyard in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and shot dead by firing squad. Pressured by organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Libyan authorities appointed a seven-judge panel to complete an investigation into the killings. The report remains unpublished…
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Set between Algiers and an undisclosed, nearby village, Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s 2002 film follows its eponymous protagonist, Rachida (Ibtissem Djouadi). To date, it is Djouadi’s only feature-length film in a lead role. At the outset of the narrative, Rachida is on her way to her job at a local school when she is ambushed by a…
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Set in Sejnane, northern Tunisia, Meryem Joobeur’s 2018 film Brotherhood follows the story of a shepherding family’s son, Malek, who has worked away for the last year in an undisclosed country. After 12 months, he finally returns home: to his mother, father (Mohamed), and brothers, where tensions flare as his family meets his new, younger…
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In 1975, the Royal Kingdom of Morocco illegally annexed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), formerly known as the ‘Spanish Sahara’. Decades later, in 2012, British director Noé Mendelle collaborated with Al Jazeera producer Flora Gregory on a film, Al Khadra: Poet of the Desert. The film traces the lives of Sahrawi peoples and their…