Moulay Rachid greets Shah Rukh Khan at a royal dinner at the Marrakech International Film Festival—AP

The Marrakesh Film Festival this year sparkled with the presence of Shah Rukh Khan among a galaxy of international stars from Hollywood and Bollywood, and the big films of the year

In Morocco, as far as cinema is concerned, the gala event is the Marrakesh festival. International stars, Hollywood and Bollywood and the big films of the year — that is Marrakesh. This year it sparkled with the presence of Shah Rukh Khan among a galaxy of superstars.
But there are a number of other specialised festivals in the country such as the Documentary Film Festival in Agadir. Unfortunately many filmmakers — in India as well as internationally — do not get to know about them. The need of the hour for emerging and even established filmmakers, is a directory of international film festivals, general and specialised.
Among the festivals in Morocco is the celebrated Sacred Music Festival in Fez — it will be 18-years-old this June — which has now become a must for all lovers of music, especially Moroccan music with its links to Andalusia and Africa, both.
And in Morocco, the Womens’ Film Festival in Sale, the twin city of the capital Rabat, was established seven years ago and has become a major event with excited audiences lining the road up to the theatres, all halls for all screenings jam packed. It was an exhilarating experience to be there.
In this charming city or rather twin cities — Sale and the capital Rabat which lies across the bridge on the river which separates them.
Rabat is the residence of the King, and the capital of the country but Sale is a much older city with the ruins of ancient forts and palaces and mosques along the river. It was here that the first demonstrations for independence from the French were sparked off.
And here, one gets transported back to a life before malls and multiplexes, the solitary interface with your computer or TV set which govern contemporary life today, where social networking is not yet the ruling presence in the lives of young people.
Sale had people milling around the film festival arena,
In Rabat, in the souk, on the streets, in the restaurants in their evocative setting., there were people everywhere. In the souk the restaurants evoked an aura of deserts and camels, the beautiful traditional Moroccan pottery and ceramics, haunting Arab music, large round tables for social and familial gatherings which are a must even in the modern, glass-fronted restaurants overlooking the river on one side, the remnants of ancient forts and palaces on the other.
Beautiful hotels on the banks of the river where the food — like everywhere in Morocco — was always a feast of the most delicious and varied dishes served with a flourish in big Moroccan dishes obviously meant for sharing with families and friends. No place for solitary brooding here..
This Womens Film Festival — there are a growing number of such festivals now in different countries, including one in Chennai — was unique in the bringing together of disparate cultures both in the films shown and in the members of the all-women jury.
As president of the jury where the members come from France and Korea, Burkina Faso and Egypt, Iran and Morocco and India it was not easy to reconcile hugely differing tastes and perspectives.
The films, by women directors or about women, came from Japan and Switzerland and Egypt, Holland and Russia and Chile — it was an amazingly eclectic mix and drove home the fact that even in this globalised world, cultural identities are still strong and widely varied. French and Arabic are the only languages — without them you are left on the fringes, out of everything.
The exceptionally talented and internationally lauded Fatemah Motamed-Arya — better known in the film world as Simin — was not only a jury member but was one of the four women honoured with a special award this time.
Last year, she was presented the prestigious Henri Langlois award in Paris. Honours have been heaped upon this very gifted actress — and also social activist — but in Iran she is now debarred from acting.
It seems our lives are to be dictated more and more by machines (if one may be permitted to so refer to computers, televisions sets and mobile phones), or by those in positions of power.
The lovely, young Moroccan director Selma Bargach was also a jury member and her film The Fifth String, was shown in the Moroccan section. About a young musician and his relationship with his guru, this beautiful film would find an echo in India and again made you realise the strong links that lie beneath the surface in our non-western cultures.
I once watched an Indian film at a festival with the late, and greatly lamented, Filipino director Marilou Diaz Abaya. At the end she said excitedly: “If one were to dub this in Tagalog, it could be a Filipino film!” It is a great shame that in our cinema halls, such films do not find a space.
The Women’s Festival in Morocco again brought home the message that cinema is unsurpassed as a carrier of cultures, bringing alive places that no one can know and experience physically in one lifetime — and festivals of films bring together people from hugely differing backgrounds which also one cannot encounter in one’s daily life.
As the great Kemal Ataturk said almost a century ago: “Cinema is so important a discovery that one day it will change the face of the world’s civilisation far more than the discovery of gunpowder, electricity and continents. Cinema will create possibilities for all men on this earth of knowing one another. Cinema will eliminate divergence of views among men and prove invaluable in realising the human idea….”