Marrakech didn’t strike me as a cinematic hotspot, but after the 8th Marrakech Film Festival, which finished over the weekend, more fool me for thinking otherwise.
Snidely deemed the poor man’s Cannes (by the French, surprisingly), the packed-out lunchtime screenings and smatter of Hollywoodites showed that Marrakech is slowly finding its feet.
As proof of progress, Morocco and the UK Film Council signed a new co-production agreement to give filmmakers access to support and funding in both Morocco and the UK. Following the waft of a business class ticket and a nice suite, a handful of British talent arrived in support of the agreement, albeit in jeans, for the closing ceremony (Charles Dance, you know who you are). And Christopher Lee, surely older than God by now, poked his nose into a few screenings with his niece, Harriet Walter, while Brian Cox, sporting a tiny pair of shorts and shaved legs, skulked around the Sofitel lobby.
Anyway, this year’s festival had the multicultural feel of a Benetton advert, with the official selection including an impressive 32 films from five continents and a jury, led by Barry Levinson, that included The Lives of Others’ Sebastian Koch; Portuguese actor Joaquim de Almeida; 24’s Ramon Salazar (the brother without the tash); British director/writer Hugh Hudson; Italian actress Caterina Murino; and Spanish writer-director Agusti Villaronga.
Ironically, the festival opened with Levinson’s What Just Happened – the story of a producer trying to impress an audience on the opening night of a film festival with a fairly crap film – and closed with a screening of 8 – the compilation of eight shorts (full review to follow) pinpointing the UN Millennium objectives.
There was warm applause, which may not seem like a big deal, but in an auditorium that applauded the shooting of an American during the screening of Babel, it came as a relief.
Chinese movie The Shaft by Zhang Chi picked up the Jury Prize, while the Etoile d’Or went to Wild Field by Georgian director Mikhail Kalatozishvili.
Grand though the show was, with an after-party buffet that gave most of us the shits, those in charge still have a lot to fine tune. The official website had no itinerary two months before the festival started and the snippets shown during the award ceremony did nothing to entice. One showed someone walking through a door and the clip of Flame & Citron saw Mads Mikkelsen turn his face to the right while driving. Or was it to the left?
To their credit, the Moroccans are doing a stellar job in nurturing home grown talent, rather than simply playing host to Western productions, but with just a little more help from their Western friends, they should be able to make that last stretch.
