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TOWARDS A THIRD CINEMA IN MOROCCO

The years the Moroccan filmmakers spent studying in Łódź in the 1960s and 1970s would have a lasting impact on their filmmaking and on Moroccan cinema more generally

Moroccan national cinema took shape within this context of transnational movement, influences, and discussions with students from around the world on the state of the world, and on the cinema to come.  Both in Poland and on their return to Morocco, they dreamt of a decolonised, transnational cinema, thoroughly anchored in Moroccan society and culture.

This effort to define a “new” cinema, as seen in Mostafa Derkaoui’s first feature film, De quelques évènements sans signification, and in the ephemeral Cinéma 3 review, edited by Nourredine Sail, remains largely unknown.  

Most of the works directly related to this effort (whether films or written texts) are either non-existent, because they remained in the project or screenplay stage, or as unedited rushes; or disappeared without a trace after being banned, then forgotten; or are unknown and hard to access.

This is an attempt to make these works visible once more, and to make a number of reference documents accessible.

“Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognises in the anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and their equivalents inside the imperialist countries, the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point - in a word, the decolonisation of culture.”

OCTAVIO GETINO and FERNANDO SOLANAS, Toward A Third Cinema, Tricontinental magazine No. 3, 1969