Meriem Bennani: dreaming of a dancing tomorrow

A collection of M&M toy clocks, a robot out of a Transformers movie next to Matryoshka dolls and, later, a glass of coke fizzing in extreme close-up, all material traces of the hybrid world, naturalistic and artificial, documentary and scripted, populated with humans and digital figures, the filmmaker creates for us to witness.

While looking at these kitschy and playful figurines, we only hear the voice of the young man and his responses, in French, to Bennani’s questions. What he describes with a blend of disarming naivete, and cold matter-of-factness, is the distance and invisible barrier erected between classes within modern Moroccan society. In a classic example of an us vs. them, the teen explains how there are in his view two categories of Moroccans, “real” Moroccans and “little” Moroccans, and how the “little” ones represent a small group with different values, different codes, in the end a more “civilized” group he says, within what appears in his words as a society that is traditional, conservative, in one word backward.

In another segment, a wonderfully articulate 13-year-old boy named Taha, offers both a more generous take on this class divides by granting the “real” Moroccans an “almost the same as us” status while being fast to point that a growing cliché has it that the Moroccan school Moroccans “like to fight”. What is fascinating here, as in the other interview, is the unaffected tone used to deliver these colonial tropes and clichés, but also their slippage from racially and culturally based to class-based, as well as their seamless internalization by these two young men and, Bennani suggests, many others in the school.

Or perhaps it is the opposite, and it is the school itself, the famed Lycée Descartes of Rabat, home to the Moroccan elite and European expats and diplomats that produces these semi-foreigners within their own country. What is at stake here, in an apparent sharp contrast to the facetiousness and humor of Bennani’s world, which combines anthropomorphic singing buildings, digitally animated talking animals and blaring raï music, are complex and timely questions of class and identity within a modern-day post-colonial Morocco entangled in neo-colonial dynamics and structures.

In order to find the courage to face this elite group of young men and women, she rehearses an opening statement where she reminds herself that she too was once a student in this institution. This is an important key to explore and apprehend Mission Teens with Bennani, but more generally her own fictional alter-egos and visual universe.

In the case of Mission Teens, Bennani is both setting herself up as witness to the lives of these higher-class Moroccan teenagers, but also as a product of this institution, itself a heritage of France’s century-long colonial presence in North Africa. Here, Bennani takes us to the source of her own intellectual and personal formation, allowing us to question how her own identity was constructed within this (post)-colonial-turned-classist bubble within modern day Morocco.

Indeed, from French Indochina, to Cambodia, to North and Western Africa, schools were named for French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, French scientist Louis Pasteur, Marshall of the French colonial army Hubert Lyautey, and others, all meant to purportedly support the spread of science and civilization in a supposedly barbarian world. All in fact showing France’s reliance on education as part of its claim of a “civilizing” mission in North Africa, and other parts of its Second Colonial Empire.

But if Bennani’s imaginative, textured, often sensuous, world might have its origins within the walls, material and metaphorical, of neo-colonial French education in Morocco, her longing for and playful approach to a decentralized, hybrid, partly digital, hyper-connected global citizenry with its speaking gender-blurred animalistic figures appears as both a product of this system, but also as a reaction and potential response to its inherent force of acculturation.

Yet, this unescapable reality of the world of the after, after colonialism, after the destruction of cultures and modes of being, in the world and with others, is both present and fleeting amongst Bennani’s characters as Davis’ interview is interrupted by a text message from Kyo the racoon reaching out to her friends from her parent’s home in Korea. “She’s tomorrow morning. She’s in the future…” says one of the salamanders.

In Bennani’s world(s) this future is both omnipresent and in a constant process of being made, dreamed, projected, but also steeped deeply within a material reality. Bennani can dream of a dancing, connected and hybrid tomorrow because she does not lose sight of the today and of the past that has not passed.