The DocTalk: in early Ja
nuary 2M organised a first meeting of documentary professionals to discuss this film genre – bringing together cinema producers, directors and distributors working in Moroccan and foreign documentary with television representatives.
Creative, or personal documentaries upset people: “an excellent barometer of a country’s health and its level of freedom”, they question society, its values, even its identity, but they also make an effort to analyse and understand the changes and challenges of the globalised world. “Culture for all, active citizenship, openness to the world,” were the words used by Reda Benjelloun, head of 2M’s News Magazine programmes and Documentaries, to describe the role of documentary. For him the documentary slot is “a powerful weapon of mass culture”. Or “a weapon of mass construction”, as Ahmed El Maanouni, chairman of the Moroccan Chamber of Film Producers, added.
Although the documentary remains the poor relation of drama, the sector’s evolution in less than 10 years is extremely encouraging and “the first indicators are very positive” said Hind Saih, chairperson of FIDADOC, the Agadir International Documentary Festival, adding that Morocco is a country of history and narrative, in which documentaries can easily find their place.
Recognizing the importance of the documentary as a tool for enlightenment and good citizenship, consolidating a country’s diverse identity, 2M has worked hard to make a place for this kind of film in its programme schedule, especially through Des Histoires et des Hommes, the unmissable Sunday night programme shown during prime-time since 2012, a virtually unprecedented commitment in the southern Mediterranean.
Many documentaries have made a deep impression on the public, – Dalila Ennadre’s “Des Murs et des Hommes”, Ahmed El Maaouni’s “Transes” or “475, Trêve de Silence” by Hind Bensari. Others, like “Hercule contre Hermes”, have brought a lawsuit against the channel Director, while another, Kamal Hachkar’s “Tinghir – Jerusalem”, provoked a sit-in outside the 2M premises after being shown. But all show the same determination to make documentaries with real views, true stories and a certain feeling for aesthetics. Documentaries which are based in reality and then question it, or romanticise, even fantasise it, create a true cinema of the real.
Reda Benjelloun also supports the “near-misses”: imperfect documentaries nobody wants but which come from a different way of looking and an almost empirical bond between image and story. Sometimes these show an accuracy rare on television, as in the case of Khaled Jarrar’s Palestinian documentary, The Infiltrators, boycotted by many Western channels and which only the Moroccans have been able watch at home.
Ahmed El Maanouni took the opportunity of this meeting to emphasize the need to create a special “testing and research” niche for young people who, he maintains, are “the true breeding ground for document creation.”
Source: 2M
