Tangier
Tangier ( ; ; ar, طنجة, Ṭanja) is a city in northwestern Morocco. It is on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. The town is the cap ...
) is a Moroccan filmmaker. His career spans more than four decades, during which he has written, produced and directed award-winning and influential feature films, short films and documentaries. He is considered to be a seminal member of the "new Arab cinema", which began to flourish in the 1970s. Its proponents, inspired by political and artistic concerns, and similar to Italy's New Realism, France's Nouvelle Vague, and the US independent and underground movements, worked outside of the studio systems of
Hollywood
Hollywood usually refers to:
* Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California
* Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States
Hollywood may also refer to:
Places United States
* Hollywood District (disambiguation)
* Hollywood, ...
and
Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...
, where business incentives dictated form and content.
Smihi has taught and lectured at Paris 8 University and at UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies. He has traveled extensively in Greece, France, Italy and in the Middle East, and has lived and worked in Egypt. Today, he divides his time between Tangier and Paris. His production company, IMAGO Film International, founded in 1979, has produced some twenty films and edited books on film theory.
Early life
As World War II was drawing to a close, Smihi was born into a religious Muslim family living in the cosmopolis of Tangier. The city, which from 1923 had the status of an "International zone" governed by France, Spain and Great Britain (with the addition of Italy in 1926), was about to undergo a process of restoration to full sovereignty that, after a period of Spanish control from 1940 to 1945 during World War II, culminated in 1956 with the signing of the Tangier Protocol.
Although the men of Smihi's family had for generations been fquihs (Muslim ministers), Smihi's father insisted that his son attend a French secular school that was conducted in both French and Arabic.
The Tangier of Smihi's childhood was home to some prominent Beat Generation writers and expats.
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles (; December 30, 1910November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his ...
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
lived there and could often be found drinking mint tea and smoking kif (Moroccan marijuana) in the Zocco Chico square. They nurtured local artists such as Mohamed Choukri and Mohamed Mrabet, whose ''Big Mirror'' was later adapted by Smihi, with a screenplay by Paul Bowles, Gavin Lambert and Smihi. Egyptian, American and Spanish films were widely shown at the time and Smihi was a fervent moviegoer.
At the same time, Smihi was becoming profoundly influenced by Marxist theory. His friendship and discussions with prominent Moroccan Marxists lead him to a deeply felt and abiding desire to articulate cultural concerns and their political expression in his films. In 1964, he took part in the political student uprising in Rabat that was ferociously repressed by the Moroccan police and army.
Career
In 1965, Smihi was awarded a scholarship by the French government and left Morocco for Paris to study filmmaking at IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques).
He was influenced by the seminars of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévy-Strauss at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and particularly by Roland Barthes, with whom he worked on a memoir.
Smihi has cited the cinéma vérité pioneer Jean Rouch and
Henri Langlois
Henri Langlois (; 13 November 1914 – 13 January 1977) was a French film archivist and cinephile. A pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema. His film screenings in Paris in the 1950s are often c ...
of the Cinémathèque Française, whom he met at the Francophone Film Festival, as being among those who imparted to him a sense of the magic of movies.
Paris was undergoing its own "revolution" in 1968 which further fueled Smihi's imaginings of an Arab "patria grande". A constant in his work is an emphasis on the interrelationships between his fictional characters, the Arab culture and its history — which Smihi views critically as permeated with decadence and colonial influence.
His first short film, ''Si Moh Pas de Chance'' (''The Unlucky Man'') portrayed the miserable conditions of North African immigrant workers in Europe. It was shot in France and won the Grand Prize at the Festival International d'Expression Française in Dinard (1971). This film, along with ''Wechma'' by his friend Hamid Benani, was presented at the
Salah Abu Seif
Salah Abu Seif ( ar, صلاح أبو سيف, ) (May 10, 1915 – June 23, 1996) was one of the most famous Egyptian film directors, and is considered to be the godfather of Neorealist cinema in Egyptian cinema. Many of the 41 films he direct ...
, he met
Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha ( arz, نجيب محفوظ عبد العزيز ابراهيم احمد الباشا, ; 11 December 1911 – 30 August 2006) was an Egyptian writer who won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. ...
, with whom he planned an adaptation of Mahfouz's novel ''Autumn Quail''. During this period, Smihi directed two films in three years, ''Defending the Egyptian Cinema'' and ''The Lady from Cairo'', the latter, the story of a woman who wants to be free and modern in an Egypt overwhelmed by terrorism.
In 1993 Smihi narrated, appeared and directed the documentary, ''With Matisse in Tangier'' which chronicles Henri Matisse's work and its relationship to Morocco.
For the past ten years Smihi has been working on an autobiography from which he adapted the screenplays of his last two features, ''A Muslim Childhood'' in 2005 (nominated at the Fifth Marrakech International Film Festival) and ''Of Virgins And Swallows'' (2008) both about his native Tangier.
In the documentary ''With Taha Hussein'' (2015), Smihi pays homage to the work of the Egyptian writer recounting Hussein's importance to Arab culture.
Selected filmography
References
2 ''Nouvel Observateur'', Paris, France, January 6, 1976; ''Jeune Afrique'', Paris, France, January 21, 1976; ''International Herald Tribune'', Paris, France, February 1976.
3 Lamalif, Casablanca, Morocco, 1981.
4 Cinema 76, Paris, France, January 1976.
5 ''Die Welt'', Berlin, Germany, 1989; ''La Repubblica'', Rome, Italy, 1991.