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On the set of the Mostafa Derkaoui’s film De Quelques Evènements Sans Signification [About Some Meaningless Events], 1974, Abdelkrim Derkaoui archives

Mostafa Derkaoui is a filmmaker and pioneer of modern Moroccan cinema, born in 1944 in Oujda, Morocco. He graduated from the Lódź Cinema School and lives in Casablanca.

Since returning to Morocco in 1972, he has continued the explorations he began in the student films he made in Poland, for a free and socially-engaged cinema that could contribute to both decolonial thought and the search for a Moroccan cinematic identity, and which would also encourage formal innovation and radicality.

His avant-gardist vision was to come up against the official and repressive one of the 1970s Moroccan state (and of the remaining colonial institutions). His first film, De quelques événements sans signification [About Some Meaningless Events, 1974], made with a collective of Casablancan artists and intellectuals, was banned. It was later restored by the Filmoteca de Catalunya and L’Observatoire Art et Recherche in 2019.

A philosophy student in Casablanca in the early 1960s, Derkaoui was passionate about theatre, but one of his first plays was banned for political reasons during the period of repression of the far left and the opposition under Hassan II.

He then left for France and spent a year studying at the Parisian film school, IDHEC. After a brief return to Morocco and the making of a first short film, "The Four Walls", produced entirely independently and now lost, he went to study at the Łódź Film School in Poland along with his brother, cameraman and director Abdelkrim Derkaoui.

Mostafa Derkaoui’s films include Les beaux jours de Shehrazade (1980), Titre provisoire (1984), Les sept portes de la nuit (1994), La grande allégorie (1995), Les amours de Hadj Mokhtar Soldi (2000), Casablanca by Night (2003), and Casablanca Day Light (2004). The French director Sophie Delvallée has made a film that traces his artistic career, "Librement Mostafa Derkaoui" (2022). The Marrakech Festival paid tribute to him in 2007.

Considered to be one of the most important Moroccan filmmakers, Derkaoui’s cinema is modernist, in its constant questioning of cinematographic codes and language, fed by references drawn from theatre, literature, intellectual thought, and music.

Derkaoui’s cinema is hugely personal, right from his first film studies, filled with his encounters with jazz musicians such as Nahorny and Wanda Warska (the wife of Kurylewicz, a pioneer of Polish modern jazz), opposition intellectuals such as Stanislaw Tym, and actresses such as Barbara Brylska, the Polish Brigitte Bardot of the time. In Morocco, his films featured the painter Farid Belkahia, the writer Mohamed Zefzef, the actress Touria Jabrane, the singer Najat Atabou, and his own wife, Khadija Nour.