4.4 
4.6 
Abdelkrim Derkaoui at home, Wiame Haddad, 2018
(4.2)
ABDELKRIM DERKAOUI
Abdelkrim Mohamed Derkaoui is a Moroccan director of photography and filmmaker born in 1945 in Oujda, and currently living in Casablanca.
Derkaoui cinematography at the Lódź Film School in Poland, where he lived from 1965 to 1972. In Poland his dissertation on widescreen systems in cinema was awarded a distinction and was published for its “great contribution to literature on the seventh art”.
Back in Morocco, Derkaoui established himself as a leading director of photography, filming more than forty films and documentaries, and obtaining numerous prizes for his work. A discreet and yet major figure in Moroccan cinema, he collaborated with his brother, the filmmaker Mostafa Derkaoui, over many years.
Derkaoui also made four films: Le Jour du Forain (1984), Rue Le Caire (1998), Les Enfants terribles de Casablanca (2010) and Les Griffes du Passé (2015).
Today, he produces series and documentaries for his company, Ciné-Scène International, and is a member of the National Chamber of Producers.
His body of photographic work from Poland, which had remained in negative albums for several decades, reflects the faithfulness, force, and poetry of his gaze on that country and records the political and artistic life of his friends.
His body of photographic work from Poland, which had remained in negative albums for several decades, reflects the faithfulness, force, and poetry of his gaze on that country and records the political and artistic life of his friends.
ARCHIVES OF ABDELKRIM DERKAOUI, POLAND, 1960s
“It was Mohammed Abdelkrim Derkaoui, my brother Krimou, who gave me my first real cinema lesson: “Mostafa, stay quiet if what you want to say isn’t as beautiful as silence!” It’s an old Arab proverb. It was on the eve of our entrance exam to the film school in Łódź. We were standing, glued together on the train taking us to Poland, holding our five old suitcases bound with old belts belonging to our father, Abderrahmane. What’s strange is that Krimou was able to take advantage of the lesson he’d intended for me. Whatever he says or does always tends towards perfection, while I continued to ramble on through the din of the wheels of a train moving on the rails at a hundred and eighty kilometres an hour. The train finally stopped in Warsaw, but I kept on talking nonsense until I grew speechless. Then I did finally shut up. Perhaps now that I [can] no longer speak, I’ll be able to succeed in making the film I’ve been trying to make since 1974, when I filmed the first shot of De quelques événements sans signification [About Some Meaningless Events].
Mostafa Derkaoui, 2018
Copyright © 2020 / Léa Morin — CINIMA3 / Talitha