Karim Idriss was a Moroccan filmmaker, born in Tangier in 1936. He died in 2009 in Paris. A forgotten figure in the History of Moroccan cinema, he faced many obstacles and restrictions and was never able to develop the kind of Moroccan cinema he had thought and dreamt of. He studied in Paris, then followed the painter Belkahia to Prague to study theatre, and at the Lódź Film School. Before going to Poland, he had already made a film for the Moroccan Centre of Cinematography, Un foyer menacé (with Paul Moity, 1964) and a film on Moroccan painting produced by Moroccan Radio and Television (RTM), Le regard qui dure (1965), selected at the Paris Biennal. This film remains impossible to find, as is Les enfants du Haouz (1970) “a poem on the children of peasantry”, as Karim told Kenza Sefrioui in the Journal Hebdomadaire in 2009, that was completed a few years later, drawing on the work of sociologist Paul Pascon. The film would be banned and re-edited by the authorities. Exiled in France, after time spent in Poland, and later in Algeria and Italy, Idriss made several reports for French television on the issue of immigration, and a documentary, Esquisse pour un portrait de famille [Sketch For a Family Portrait, 1979], while still trying and ultimately failing to make a feature film in Morocco. His friends and colleagues all describe him as an exceptional, intelligent and extremely cultivated man, who could have contributed greatly to Moroccan cinema had he not faced censorship. Their words confirm the (rare) traces of his cinema and thought, including his contribution to the debate on Moroccan cinema in the review Souffles in 1966, and his Polish student films. These recently rediscovered short films, at once accomplished portraits of women and experimental, cinematographic poems, show us the potential of his cinema and the intentions that guided his regrettably missing or unfinished films.



FILMOGRAPHY IN POLAND:

MARTA

Idriss Karim, 6 min, 1969

ELZBIETA K.

Idriss Karim, 12 min, 1973

PIEŚŃ NA ŚMIERĆ MŁODZIEŃCÓW

[A Hymn on the Death of the Young]
Idriss Karim, 11 min, 1973