About some Meaningless Events

Programme

• Film: About Some Meaningless Events (De quelques evénements sans signification) (Mostafa Derkaoui, MA 1974, 76’)

  Around the port’s streets and popular bars of Casablanca, a group of filmmakers conducts discussions with people about their expectations of and aspirations for the emerging Moroccan national cinema. When a disgruntled worker kills his superior accidentally, their inquest shifts focus, and they begin to probe the context and motives of the killing. At the heart of De quelques événements sans signification is an interrogation on the role of cinema (and art) in society, documentary and the Real, and what constitutes an urgency for a national cinema that is being born.
  
  This unique filmic experience was conceived as an independent and collective effort of militant filmmakers, actors, musicians, poets and journalists at a time of heightened repression on freedom of expression in Morocco and was funded by the sale of paintings by several contemporary painters. The film was first screened in Paris in 1975 but was immediately taxed with censorship and forbidden from exhibition and export. It was forgotten until a negative print was found in the archives of the Filmoteca de Catalunya in 2016 and restored there in collaboration with L'Observatoire (Casablanca). Forty-five years after its completion, the film is finally released.

• Presentation: Archives Bouanani (Rabat, Morocco)

  The Bouanani family is a film family: Ahmed Bouanani was a writer and director; Naïma Saoudi was a costume designer, set designer, producer, director, actress, producer, script, and assistant editor; and their daughter Batoul was a dresser and costume designer. They left behind them a substantial number of books, magazines, manuscripts, drawings, scripts, notes, posters, costumes, and props, which bear witness not only to the family's life and work but also more broadly to Morocco's cultural history. Today, Touda Bouanani continues the work of collecting and conserving but also of valorizing their legacy through the Archives Bouanani association.
  
  Presentation by Léa Morin (Talitha) and Touda Bouanani (Archives Bouanani).